Structure
This protein contains about 280 amino acids and forms a beta barrel which spans span the mitochondrial outer membrane.
Since its discovery in 1976, extensive function and structure analysis of VDAC proteins has been conducted. A prominent feature of the pore emerged: when reconstituted into planar lipid bilayers, there is a voltage-dependent switch between an anion-selective high-conductance state with high metabolite flux and a cation-selective low-conductance state with limited passage of metabolites.
More than 30 years after its initial discovery, in 2008, three independent structural projects of VDAC-1 were completed. The first was solved by multi-dimensional NMR spectroscopy. The second applied a hybrid approach using crystallographic data. The third was for mouse VDAC-1 crystals determined by X-ray crystallographic techniques. The three projects of the 3D structures of VDAC-1 revealed many structural features. First, VDAC-1 represents a new structural class of outer membrane β-barrel proteins with an odd number of strands. Another aspect is that the negatively charged side chain of residue E73 is oriented towards the hydrophobic membrane environment. The 19-stranded 3D structure obtained under different experimental sources by three different laboratories fits the EM and AFM data from native membrane sources and represents a biologically relevant state of VDAC-1.
Read more about this topic: Voltage-dependent Anion Channel
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)