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Updated: Sep 3, 2025

Native Cell Membrane Nanoparticles System for Membrane Protein-Protein Interaction Analysis
Published on: July 16, 2020
Mechanism Study of Proteins under Membrane Environment
Yue Zhang1,2,3, Xiaohong Zhu1,2,3, Honghui Zhang1,3
1School of Life and Health Sciences, School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen 518172, China.
Abstract:
Membrane proteins play crucial roles in various physiological processes, including molecule transport across membranes, cell communication, and signal transduction. Approximately 60% of known drug targets are membrane proteins. There is a significant need to deeply understand the working mechanism of membrane proteins in detail, which is a challenging work due to the lack of available membrane structures and their large spatial scale. Membrane proteins carry out vital physiological functions through conformational changes. In the current study, we utilized a coarse-grained (CG) model to investigate three representative membrane protein systems: the TMEM16A channel, the family C GPCRs mGlu2 receptor, and the P4-ATPase phospholipid transporter. We constructed the reaction pathway of conformational changes between the two-end structures. Energy profiles and energy barriers were calculated. These data could provide reasonable explanations for TMEM16A activation, the mGlu2 receptor activation process, and P4-ATPase phospholipid transport. Although they all belong to the members of membrane proteins, they behave differently in terms of energy. Our work investigated the working mechanism of membrane proteins and could give novel insights into other membrane protein systems of interest.
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