Structural refinements of proteins have become essential in order to understand the function of these biological macromolecules. Existing techniques of biomolecular NMR, though successful for globular protein, have been quite difficult to implement for membrane proteins. My research aims to develop new methods for paramagnetic metal ion tagging of membrane protein to measure restrains like paramagnetic relaxation enhancement (PRE), pseudo contact shift (PCS) and residual dipolar coupling (RDC). These restrains can be used to optimize knowledge based scoring functions in order to refine the three dimensional structure of membrane proteins.
Alumni Project Members: Soumya Ganguly, Heather Darling