blog

After comforting myself that I was using it merely as a reference, and was not in fact the dummy, I have been known to invest my money in one of the For Dummies series of books. From Divorce for Dummies to Building Chicken Coops for Dummies these books are instantly recognizable by their bright yellow covers; something that Antoine Gautier and colleagues at Cambridge University noted to their advantage when they created a poster on structure determination of integral membrane proteins with NMR spectroscopy, presented at the Biochemical Society’s Annual Symposium Recent Advances in Membrane Biochemistry.

Structure determination of integral membrane proteins is a challenge, and though the majority of structures have been determined using x-ray crystallography, NMR has played an important role. The seven-helix transmembrane proteins have proved exceptrionally inaccessible, which is why the development of methods to determine their structures is particularly valuable. Presenting their methods in this poster allowed Gautier and colleagues to step through their methodology and strategy when using NMR, and it gives a clear overview of the whole project from start to finish. The NMR structure of the seven-helix sensory rhodopsin II receptor protein itself was published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology last year¹.

Gautier realized that work on membrane protein expression and structural analysis presented at the conference would be focusing almost entirely on the use of x-ray crystallography. He explains, “I therefore decided to have a bright and colorful poster to catch the eye of crystallographers, to let them know that NMR does contribute to structure determination of seven transmembrane proteins.”

Despite an initial worry that the crystallography community would be offended by the suggestion that they were dummies, it appears the risk paid off: “I did not receive any bad comments at all, people seemed to be amused,” Gautier says. None-the-less, he is aware that this may have to remain a one-off success; commenting how the poster title may come off as a little cocky, he concludes, “I might go for a more classical approach next time.”

Still, dummy or not, the poster is worth a look!