Université de Fribourg

Methyl-branched lipids promote the membrane adsorption of α-synuclein by enhancing shallow lipid-packing defects

Garten, Matthias ; Prévost, Coline ; Cadart, Clotilde ; Gautier, Romain ; Bousset, Luc ; Melki, Ronald ; Bassereau, Patricia ; Vanni, Stefano

In: Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 2015, vol. 17, no. 24, p. 15589–15597

Alpha-synuclein (AS) is a synaptic protein that is directly involved in Parkinson's disease due to its tendency to form protein aggregates. Since AS aggregation can be dependent on the interactions between the protein and the cell plasma membrane, elucidating the membrane binding properties of AS is of crucial importance to establish the molecular basis of AS aggregation into toxic fibrils....

Université de Fribourg

Packmem: a versatile tool to compute and visualize interfacial packing defects in lipid bilayers

Gautier, Romain ; Bacle, Amélie ; Tiberti, Marion L. ; Fuchs, Patrick F. ; Vanni, Stefano ; Antonny, Bruno

In: Biophysical Journal, 2018, vol. 115, no. 3, p. 436–444

The analysis of the structural organization of lipid bilayers is generally performed across the direction normal to the bilayer/water interface, whereas the surface properties of the bilayer at the interface with water are often neglected. Here, we present PackMem, a bioinformatic tool that performs a topographic analysis of the bilayer surface from various molecular dynamics simulations....