Biophysical Society Bulletin | December 2022

Publications

Know the Editor Oliver Beckstein Arizona State University Associate Editor Biophysical Reports

Oliver Beckstein

What are you currently working on that excites you? All cells must move matter across the cell membrane; oth erwise, the cell starves or dies because of accumulation of waste products. More generally, cells must maintain their content at just the right levels to function correctly. In my re search group, we want to know how some of the membrane proteins work that act as transporters for ions and small molecules and thus keep cells functioning. “Knowing how something works” means for us to use computer simula tions to first identify the parts of the protein that move their “cargo” and describe the large functional protein movements and then to quantify these processes. We then use statistical mechanics theory to build a quantitative model of the whole transport process. I am very excited about our ongoing work because it represents a bottom-up approach to deriving dynamic function (such as the number of molecule transport ers per second as a function of membrane potential, pH, and concentrations) from static protein structures, something I always wanted to do since I first learned about molecular dy namics simulations at the beginning of my graduate studies. Who would you like to sit next to at a dinner party (scientist or not)? I’d love to sit next to Emmy Noether —she was one of the greatest mathematicians of the early 20th century. I would probably not understand much of the work that she’s fa mous for (such as abstract algebra), but as a physicist, I know Noether’s theorem, which connects symmetries to conserved quantities and is one of the most beautiful applications of mathematics to physics. And she comes from my hometown of Erlangen in Bavaria, Germany. I even went to the school that bears her name, although at the time I knew embarrass ingly little about our namesake. I’d want to know how she managed to do all her fantastic work against the stiff opposi tion of a society that never treated her with the same respect as her male colleagues (although she seemed to have many allies amongst the mathematicians with whom she worked). I hope she’d be happy to hear that her work is admired, even by computational biophysicists.

Editor’s Pick Biophysical Reports Electrically stimulated droplet injector for reduced sample consumption in serial crystallography Mukul Sonker, Diandra Doppler, Ana Egatz-Gomez, Sahba Zaare, Mohammad T. Rabbani, Abhik Manna, Jorvani Cruz Villarreal, Garrett Nelson, Gihan K. Ketawala, Konstantinos Karpos, Roberto C. Alvarez, Reza Nazari, Darren Thifault, Rebecca Jernigan, Dominik Oberthür, Huijong Han, Raymond Sierra, Mark S. Hunter, Alexander Batyuk, Christopher J. Kupitz, Robert E. Sublett, Frederic Poitevin, Stella Lisova, Valerio Mariani, Alexandra Tolstikova, Sebastien Boutet, Marc Messerschmidt, J. Domingo Meza-Aguilar, Raimund Fromme, Jose M. Martin-Garcia, Sabine Botha, Petra Fromme, Thomas D. Grant, Richard A. Kirian, Alexandra Ros “Serial crystallography of proteins with powerful X-ray lasers is an emerging field in structure determination but is ham pered by the large amount of protein sample needed for rel evant protein structure determination, making this approach cumbersome and cost intensive. To overcome these serious limitations, the authors developed a novel injector delivering protein crystal sample to the path of the X-ray laser. They encapsulated the protein crystals in droplets intersected by an immiscible oil and show that the droplet release can be electrically triggered in a tailored microfluidic droplet detector. The authors demonstrate this novel injection principle at the Macromolecular Femtosecond Crystallography instrument at the Linac Coherent Light Source and characterize the droplet generation quality as well as diffraction of injected protein crystals.”

Version of Record Published September 29, 2022 DOI: https:/doi.org/10.1016/j.bpr.2022.100081

December 2022

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