Amy Y. Shih, Peter L. Freddolino, Stephen G. Sligar, and Klaus Schulten.
Disassembly of nanodiscs with cholate.
Nano Letters, 7:1692-1696, 2007.
SHIH2007B
Nanodiscs are protein-lipid particles, which furnish a nanometer-sized membrane environment for the investigation of membrane proteins. Nanodiscs assemble spontaneously upon the removal of cholate from an initial mixture of cholate, lipids, and engineered amphipathic proteins. A combined experimental-computational approach is applied here to study the disassembly of nanodiscs through the addition of cholate to pre-formed particles. For this purpose small-angle X-ray scattering experiments and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations were performed and compared. The study offers a detailed view of nanodisc dynamics.