Abstract
Membrane proteins spend their time surrounded by lipids. For a long time, researchers thought those lipids didn’t really matter, that they were just a backdrop for the real players, an annoyance to be purified away before studying the proteins. But that view is changing. “It doesn’t make any sense to disregard proteins’ direct environment,” says Cedric Govaerts, a biologist who studies membrane proteins at Universite libre de Bruxelles. “It’s part of the picture. Why wouldn’t it play a role?” Not seeing lipids affecting membrane proteins, he says, would be the real surprise. Suspecting lipid-protein effects and actually observing them are two different things. But thanks to improved biophysical and structural biology methods, more and more studies are finding that lipids do indeed play important roles in regulating the structure, function, and dynamics of membrane proteins. Many such proteins are potential drug targets, and understanding these interactions could give researchers another
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