Chilton: Membrane protein facility opens for business

Research resource

The Membrane Protein Laboratory (MPL) has opened at Diamond, the synchrotron light source in Oxfordshire, UK, the world’s first such facility to be based inside a synchrotron. 

The facilities at the laboratory, a joint venture between Diamond and Imperial College, with funding from the Wellcome Trust, are open to academics and industry worldwide.

Membrane protein structures are particularly difficult to elucidate and to date fewer than five of 7,000 human membrane proteins have been solved. At the same time, they are very important in drug discovery and development, with over 50 percent of currently marketed drugs targeting membrane proteins.

The difficulty arises because membrane proteins are notoriously hard to crystallise. The operators of Diamond believe that having a dedicated laboratory within the synchrotron building, close to the beam lines where membrane protein structures can be solved by X-ray crystallography, will greatly enhance scientists’ ability to successfully crystallise membrane proteins and further understanding of these drug targets.

Membrane proteins perform a wide range of biological functions including respiration, signal transduction and molecular transport. The results of various genome projects have shown that up to 30 percent of proteins are membrane proteins.

A more fundamental understanding of the structure-function relationships of membrane proteins will contribute to structure and fragment-based drug design. The mission of the MPL is to provide equipment, training and expertise in the area, and to develop new techniques for crystallisation and structure. This is expected to lead to substantial improvements in the rate at which structures of membrane proteins are solved.

Professor So Iwata of the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College and Director of the Membrane Protein Laboratory said, “These proteins are generally avoided by structural biologists as they are a challenge to study due to the fact that they are very oily and hydrophobic.  [MPL] will enable expertise in this specialist field [to] be shared and we can encourage other structural biologists to take on the challenge of solving these difficult but extremely important proteins.”  

MPL is open to applications from laboratories anywhere in the world. Visitors can go for a few days or a few weeks to learn techniques for crystallising membrane proteins and to set up crystallisation trials using MPL’s robotic crystallisation system.