Studying protein unfolding and translocation by the protease FtsH with optical tweezers

The protease FtsH is a membrane anchored protease that degrades misfolded (membrane) proteins. To study the mechanism behind unfolding and translocation with optical tweezers, the protease had to be purified. However, full-length FtsH has hardly been studied as solubilizing this membrane anchored protease is challenging. Our group (Dr. V....

Synthetic Cell Aspirations: A Toolbox for Building a Membrane Container from the Bottom Up

Everything that we consider alive, be it plants, dogs, bacteria or humans, is composed of the same microscopic building blocks: cells. While cells between and even within these organisms can look and behave very differently, they all share the same key functionalities: they can grow, they can divide to proliferate, they can eat and metabolise to...

Biological Production of Spatially Organized Functional Materials

Catastrophic breakage of a material might bring severe accidents in aerospace engineering, construction, and transportation field. Therefore, engineering material with high toughness values is very important for these special applications. Many biological materials in nature, such as nacre, silk, and wood, possess high toughness values because...

Illuminating the highly dynamic on-cell target search of bacteriophage and phage-like particles

Phages are nanomachines composed of a protein coat encapsulating a genome. Since they are metabolically inert, they depend on a bacterial host for replication. They are abundantly present in all kinds of environments, patiently awaiting their target. The nanoscopic mechanical details of how phages or phage-like particles find the correct target...

Experimental Investigation of Ciliary Flow with C. reinhardtii: Hydrodynamics, Ultrastructure, and Ciliary difference

The microscopicworld is surprisingly busywith swimming micro-organisms. In a droplet of pondwater, there can be tens of thousands of microbes. They are predators and preys, producers and consumers, and they formthe bottom levels of the ecology of our world. The swimming micro-organisms can be in general classified into prokaryotes and eukaryotes...

Biochemical and structural studies of FtsH, a membrane anchored degradation machine

Proteins are one of the most important constituents of cells, since they are responsible for various processes such as replication, translation, etc. Interestingly, proteins are also responsible for the degradation of proteins that do not assemble well, and/or which are not necessary anymore inside the cell. This process of proteins destruction...