Association of Aquaporin Transmembrane Channels and Influence of their Oligomerization State on the Transport Properties

Project Information

AQPASSOC

Grant agreement ID: 254470

Project closed

Start date 22 October 2010

End date 21 October 2012

Funded under

• Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Total cost € 165 958,60

EU contribution € 165 958,60

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI CAGLIARI
Italy

Objective

The goals of this proposal are to (i) determine how does the oligomerization state of aquaporin (AQP) transmembrane channels influence the water transport properties of these channels, and to (ii) understand how aquaporins’ association and transport properties change under different lipid composition conditions. The study will be conducted on the human AQP5 aquaporin, whose atomistic high resolution structure has been recently determined. First we will determine the water transport properties of the wildtype tetrameric AQP5 channels from fully atomistic simulations. Then we will compare our results with the corresponding properties we obtain for a single channel in the same lipid bilayer. Second, we will study the association of AQP5 channels in a lipid bilayer closest to its natural environment by describing both the dynamics and the energetics of such associations. Since these processes occur on a mesoscopic timescale, unattainalble from fully atomistic simulations, we will use a coarse-grained model of the AQP5 porins and its surrounding environment. Third, we will investigate the influence of lipid composition on the association of these aquaporins. Fourth, we will compare transport properties of AQP5 channels in various lipids that were studied at the third point. The simulated systems will use fully atomistic models with initial configurations obtained from the coarse-grained simulations. The techniques used in our research proposal are based on free energy profile calculations using well established methods from steered molecular dynamics, as well as new approaches from Monte Carlo based flat-histogram simulations. Our novel approach for studying aquaporins can help us understand better how their association influences their functionality. Furthermore, the proposed investigating methods can be, in principle, extended to any transmembrane Channel that manifest oligomerization.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• natural sciences › biological sciences › biochemistry › biomolecules › lipids

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Programme(s)

• FP7-PEOPLE - Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

• FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IIF - Marie Curie Action: "International Incoming Fellowships"

Call for proposal

FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IIF
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

MC-IIF - International Incoming Fellowships (IIF)

Coordinator

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI CAGLIARI

• EU contribution: € 165 958,60
• Address: VIA UNIVERSITA 40 ; 09124 Cagliari ; Italy
• Region: Isole › Sardegna › Cagliari
• Activity type: Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
• Total cost: No data