Membrane Protein Folding - Theory, Biology and Design

An understanding of protein folding is essential for most of the major quests of structural biology, including learning how to predict structure, how proteins evolve, how mutations cause disease and how to design novel proteins. As a result, protein folding has been a major field of investigation for the past 50 years. In this effort, however, membrane proteins have been largely ignored. Indeed, a Pubmed search for "protein folding" yields more than 34,000 references, but a search for "membrane protein folding" yields less than 200. In-depth folding experiments on membrane proteins have lagged behind their soluble counterparts because membrane proteins are unimportant, but because they are simply hard to study. This conference will bring together cellular, biophysical and computational investigations of membrane protein folding and design with the purpose of sharing expertise and solutions to this challenging problem.