Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting | Bucharest 2026

Biophysics of Membrane Reactions in Brian

Poster Abstracts

1-POS Board 1 PROBING PROTEIN ORIENTATIONS AND CONFORMATIONS IN NATIVE MEMBRANES USING MD SIMULATIONS AND NMR SPECTROSCOPY Vlad Cojocaru 2,4 ; Ajit Kumar Bishoyi 1 ; Charalampos Ntallis 1 ; ShengQi Xiang 3 ; Markus Weingarth 1 ; Marc Baldus 1 ; 1 Utrecht University, NMR Spectroscopy, Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research, Utrecht , The Netherlands 2 Babes-Bolyai University, Computational Structural Biochemisry Group, STAR-UBB Institute, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 3 University of Science and Technology of China, MOE Key Lab for Membrane-less Organelles & Cellular Dynamics, School of Life Sciences, Anhui, China 4 Utrecht University, Computational Structural Biology Group, Utrecht, The Netherlands Lipoproteins are involved in diverse cellular processes that take place in and around cell membranes. A prominent example refers to the biogenesis of outer membrane proteins mediated by the β -barrel assembly machinery (BAM) that comprises the integral membrane protein BamA and several lipoproteins (BamB-BamE). These proteins are present in pathogens that also cause brain infections such as bacterial meningitis. Therefore, elucidating how these proteins interact with the bacterial membranes can be essential not only for general therapeutic targeting mechanism but also for specifically tackling bacterial infections in the brain. I will present here how molecular dynamics simulations combined with NMR spectroscopy can be a powerful approach in discovering the structural details and dynamics of the interactions between such protein complexes and lipid bilayers. We expect that this approach can be used successfully in studying the interactions between lipoproteins and native membranes. Reference: Bishoyi AK, Ntallis C, Cojocaru V, Xiang S, Weingarth M, Baldus M. Probing the Conformation of BamC and BamE in Native Bacterial Membranes Using Solid-State NMR Spectroscopy. J Am Chem Soc. 2026 Mar 4;148(8):8554-8566. doi:10.1021/jacs.5c19778. Epub 2026 Feb 17. PMID: 41702852.

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