Protein and Lipid Organization in Bacteria

Clark University, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

In this project the PI will apply methods and modeling techniques from statistical mechanics and soft condensed matter to elucidate the physical principles underlying protein organization in living cells. The research will build on recent work by the PI and his collaborators. The main components of the proposed research include investigating (i) protein-lipid interactions and their effect on domain morphologies and protein localization, (ii) dynamics of lipid domains and lipid re-localization in growing and dividing cells, (iii) changes in lipid and protein localization profiles with changes in cell shape, temperature and other physical or biological parameters, and (iv) spatial organization and stochastic nucleation of protein clusters in growing bacteria. The research lies at the interface of physics, biology, and chemistry and will involve a combination of theoretical and computational techniques that include analytical field-theoretic methods as well as Monte Carlo, Langevin, and Brownian dynamics simulations, and will be carried out in close collaboration with experimentalists. The results from this research will be incorporated into an interdisciplinary undergraduate course on the physics of biomolecular networks that the PI is developing. The PI will be involved in high school teacher training programs, thus exposing students to the excitement of scientific activity. This research is co-sponsored by the Physics of Living Systems program in the Physics Division and the Molecular Biophysics program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biology at NSF.