Dynamics of membranes and their constituents

LINXS Workshop September 12th-14th in Lund

Join us in Lund for a lunch-to-lunch workshop from Wednesday (12th) to Friday (14th) of September!

With this Dynamics workshop, our goal is to bring together leading experts in the field of membrane dynamics, with a particular focus on neutrons and X-rays, but also complementary techniques including NMR, single molecule spectroscopy and computer modeling. The event is free of charge and we encourage submission of abstract for contributed talks (20 minutes) and posters. We expect to host up to 90 participants on a first-come-first-served basis.

Topics

• Dynamics of multi-component membranes including local composition fluctuations, lipid flip-flop, and thickness fluctuations and their dependence on local composition
• Protein dynamics and dependence on the local membrane environment
• Translocation dynamics, transport processes in general, use of vesicles as model systems
• Stacked membranes, non-lamellar phases and the effect of external stimuli
• Simulations at all relevant length scales and coarse graining strategies
• Development of neutron- and x-ray based techniques (evanescent wave, NSE, GINSE, XPCS), complementary tools (NMR, fluorescence)

Invited speakers

Prof. Erik Lindahl, Stockholm University, Sweden
Prof. Dr. Claudia Steinem, University of Goettingen, Germany
Ass. Prof. Marta Bally, Umeå University, Sweden
Prof. Dr. Motumu Tanaka, Heidelberg University, Germany and Kyoto University, Japan
Dr. John Katsaras (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN,  USA
Prof. Tim Salditt, University of Göttingen, Germany
Dr. Olaf Holderer, Julich Center for Neutron Scattering at MLZ, Garching, Germany
Prof. Mei Hong, MIT, Boston, MA, USA
Prof. John Seddon, Imperial College, London, UK
Dr. Michihiro Nagao, NIST Center for neutron research, Gaithersburg MD, USA
Dr. Victoria Garcia Sakai, ISIS, STFC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell, Oxfordshire, UK
Dr. Lukasz Cwiklik, Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Dr Lionel Porcar, Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, France

Workshop Description

Recent years have seen strong research efforts on the lipid component of biological membranes. While many studies have been focused on the membranestructure, the dynamics of such systems are crucial for the function of  the membrane including membrane bound proteins.

The relevant time scales are wide, from seconds to nanoseconds, and therefore a combination of techniques and modelling tools are requires. To some extent and for longer timescales ”traditional” neutron and x-ray scattering techniques can be used. However this often requires a particular sample environment like stopped-flow set-up or temperature and pressure jumps.

Inelastic neutron scattering techniques and X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) has emerged as promising techniques, which will particularly benefit from the new powerful neutron and synchrotron facilities, ESS and Max IV, built up in Lund.

This will be particularly useful for membrane dynamics studies. Increasingly, synchrotron and neutron users as well as large scale facilities have realised the strength of combining large-scale facilities techniques with lab instruments. This includes fluorescence, NMR, surfacechemistry techniques and light scattering. They do not only allow better planning of experiments at the large scale facilities, but also provide complementary information that sometimes are essential for the evaluation of neutron and synchrotron x-ray and neutron data.

The development of coarse graining strategies and other modelling tools has allowed us to develop relevant in silico models of the dynamics of rather complex membranes. Although these simulation have given us insight on the dynamics, the combination with in particular Quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS) and other inelastic neutron scattering techniques such as neutron spin-echo with modelling have emerged as powerful tool box do study dynamics in life science systems. The experimental studies will give the needed relevant parameters for the simulations and inversely the simulations will help interpret the experimental data. It is clear that neutron and synchrotron x-ray techniques are powerful techniques to study dynamics in biomembrane systems.

Organising committee

Tommy Nylander, Physical chemistry, Lund University
Peter Jönsson, Physical chemistry, Lund University
Emma Sparr, Physical chemistry, Lund University
Marité Cárdenas, Biomedical Science, Malmö University