I have just begun a Masters degree in Molecular Biophysics in the lab of John Rubinstein. The research focus of the lab is electron cryomicroscopy of membrane protein complexes. For the most part the lab has focused much of their energy on ATP synthase and its many varient across species as well as in individual cells.
My project is initially looking at a different membrane protein complex, the yeast oligosaccryltransferase (OST). This is a ER based complex that works in conjuction with the translocon and ribosome to add sugar chains (glycosylate) proteins expressing a consensus amino acid sequence -N-X-T/S-. Somewhere around 70% of proteins entering the ER/Golgi network are glycosylated but we know very little about the mechanism behind this or what role they play in protein function
To give some insight into how important this complex is, of the 9 proteins that make up this complex in yeast, deletion of 5 of these proteins result in cell death.
At the moment, I am trying to learn all there is to know about electron microscopy (which is a lot!) as well as generate 3XFLAG tagged mutants of 3 subunits of the OST complex to aid in purifying the complex for imaging. The ultimate goal is to generate a high resolution 3D model of the intact complex which can be used to answer some yet unknown questions regarding this important and mysterious complex.
Stay Tuned!