heynderickx arnault CINaM

Photoactive Phospholipids Probes to Study Biomembranes (Dr Arnault Heynderickx in collaboration with Dr L. Peng)


Biological membranes containing lipids and proteins not only serve as a barrier protecting the cells they surround, but are also involved in some essential biological processes. Membrane proteins are of special importance for drug discovery because more than 50% drugs are targeted to the membrane proteins. To understand their structural and functional properties, it is crucial to study the membrane proteins with their surrounding lipids and analyze the protein-lipid interactions. Photo-crosslinking with photoactive phospholipidic probes is a useful approach for this purpose, because it can allow us to identify the proteins that interact with the probes and to map the probe binding sites on the proteins, and thus to study the lipid-lipid and lipid-protein interactions (Figure 1).

The successful photolabeling of raft components using our probe will allow us to analyze further the organization of cell membranes as well as to study dynamic properties of proteins in cell membranes during various biological processes such as signal transduction, cell differentiation and viral infection etc. We hope that these studies will throw useful light on both the functional and structural properties of biological membranes as well as identifying novel therapeutic targets and contributing to drug development programs.