logo-fast uniblau klein.png

IRTG / Soft Matter Science
Freiburger Materialforschungszentrum
Stefan-Meier-Str. 21
79104 Freiburg, Germany

softmattergraduate[at]uni-freiburg.de


|    Flyer   |   Poster   |


Uni-Logo
You are here: Home Events Prof. Dr. Jan Lipfert "Studying Micelles, Membrane Proteins, Nucleic Acids, and Molecular Distances by Small-Angle X-ray Scattering"

Prof. Dr. Jan Lipfert "Studying Micelles, Membrane Proteins, Nucleic Acids, and Molecular Distances by Small-Angle X-ray Scattering"

— filed under:

Department of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich, Germany

What
  • Seminar
When Jun 08, 2016
from 02:15 PM to 03:00 PM
Where Seminarraum A, FMF, Stefan-Meier-Str. 21, Freiburg
Add event to calendar vCal
iCal

Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) is a powerful technique to characterize the structure and interactions of biological macromolecules and their complexes and assemblies in solution. A strength of the technique is the ability to probe molecules in free solution, under virtually arbitrary solution conditions, from (near) physiological to highly denaturing, with full control over temperature, pH, or salt and ligand concentrations, without the need for specific labeling or crystallization of the sample. These advantages make SAXS an attractive technique to probe in particular membrane proteins and nucleic acids, which are notoriously difficult to crystallize. At the same time, SAXS does not achieve atomic resolution available from crystallography or NMR spectroscopy, creating an urgent need to enhance the information available from SAXS measurements.

In my talk, I will give a brief introduction to the SAXS technique (1), as carried out both at synchrotron and in-house sources (2). I will then discuss uses of SAXS to probe membrane protein-detergent complexes and detergent micelles (3-6). In addition, I will describe a new molecular ruler technique based on anomalous SAXS of gold-labeled samples that enables the measurements of molecular distance distributions with sub-Å level precision (Zettl, et al. Nano Letters, in press). Finally, I will highlight recent work where we have employed SAXS to probe the structure and conformational changes of very large DNA origami assemblies (Bruetzel, et al., submitted).

 

invited by Volker Knecht

Personal tools