Monthly Archives: June 2023

New Publication: Alchembed

In much of my research I’ve looked at how proteins embedded in cell membranes behave. An important part in any simulation of a membrane protein is, obviously, putting it into a model membrane, often a square patch of several hundred lipid molecules. This is surprisingly difficult: although a slew of methods have been published, none of them can embed several proteins simultaneously into a complex (non-flat) arrangement of lipids. For example, a virus, as shown in our recent paper.

Here we introduce a new method, dubbed Alchembed, that uses an alternative way, borrowed from free energy calculations, of “turning on�? the van der Waals interactions between the protein and the rest of the system. We show how it can be used to embed five different proteins into a model vesicle on a standard workstation. If you want to try it out, there is a on GitHub. This assumes you have is setup

 

You can get the paper for free from .