编辑推荐：
在近日的《美国科学院院刊》（PNAS）的网络版上，来自美国爱荷华州大学化学系的华裔女教授洪梅（Mei Hong）领导的研究组公布了对细胞脂质双层中一种β-发夹抗菌肽的结构分析结果。
生物通报道：在近日的《美国科学院院刊》（PNAS）的网络版上，来自美国爱荷华州大学化学系的华裔女教授洪梅（Mei Hong）领导的研究组公布了对细胞脂质双层中一种β-发夹抗菌肽的结构分析结果。
研究人员利用固态核磁共振仪来分析脂质双层（模拟细菌内层膜或红细胞膜）中一种β-发夹抗菌肽的低聚物结构。
（韩国近期重大研究成果快递）
分析结果如下：
分析结果如下：
1H spin diffusion from lipids to the peptide indicates that PG-1 contacts both the lipid acyl chains and the headgroups in the anionic membrane but resides far from the lipid chains in the POPC/cholesterol bilayer.
19F spin diffusion data indicates that 75% of the -hairpins have homodimerized N strands and C strands in the anionic membrane.
The resulting (NCCN)n multimer suggests a membrane-inserted -barrel enclosing a water pore. The lipids surrounding the -barrel have high orientational disorder and chain upturns, thus they may act as fillers for the pore. These results revise several features of the toroidal pore model, first proposed for magainin and subsequently applied to PG-1. In the POPC/cholesterol membrane, the N and C strands of PG-1 cluster into tetramers, suggesting the formation of -sheets on the membrane surface. Thus, the membrane composition plays a decisive role in defining the assembly and insertion of PG-1. The different oligomeric structures of PG-1 help to explain its greater toxicity for bacteria than for eukaryotic cells.
研究的负责人简介：
Mei Hong, Professor of Chemistry, received her B.A. degree in 1992 from Mount Holyoke College and her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of California at Berkeley. Following one year of research as a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was a Research Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 1999, she joined the faculty at Iowa State University. Her research centers on the development and application of solid-state NMR spectroscopy to investigate the structure and dynamics of membrane proteins and insoluble fibrous proteins. She has received a number of awards for this work, including a Beckman Young Investigator award in 1999, a Research Corporation Innovation award in 2000, a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2001, and the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award in 2003. She was named an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 2002. She serves on the organizing committees of the Experimental NMR Conference and the Rocky Mountain Conference on Analytical Chemistry, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Magnetic Resonance.
