Every living cell is wrapped in a fatty membrane, and this team wants to understand exactly how those membranes work—and then build new ones from scratch. The problem is that membrane science in the UK is fragmented. Different labs study different pieces—how lipids assemble, how proteins reshape membranes, how cells control fat production—but they rarely connect. This grant funds a platform to link them: a network of researchers who will share equipment, swap personnel, and run workshops on the biggest unanswered questions at the boundary between biology and physics. If the work succeeds, it could change how we design medical imaging agents. The team plans to develop “lipid mesophase engineering rules”—essentially, a recipe book for creating custom fat-based structures that could carry contrast agents or drugs to specific tissues. More fundamentally, they aim to crack two long-standing puzzles: how cells maintain different lipid compositions on the inner and outer halves of their membranes (membrane asymmetry), and how proteins control the shape of those membranes. This is primarily fundamental science. There is no immediate product or clinical trial. But understanding how cells build and regulate their outer boundaries is the kind of knowledge that underpins future drug delivery systems, synthetic biology, and even artificial cell construction.
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The proposed Platform grant renewal is aimed at giving us the ability to capitalise upon our position as a world leading group in membrane biophysics and self-assembled amphiphilic materials, and to promote and facilitate collaborations within the currently fragmented membrane biophysics community in the UK. To achieve these aims we will form collaborative research networks with groups having complementary expertise, and encourage interconnections between external groups via a combination of 'Ideas Workshops' and IT platforms. These networks will focus upon tackling key challenges at the Life Sciences Interface requiring multi-disciplinary approaches. We will support targeted short-term personnel exchange with a view to effecting knowledge transfer, proof-of-concept experiments and research training. Within this framework we will invite key collaborators as academic visitors and to present seminar series within our Department. We also wish to continue to facilitate exploitation of our specialised facilities by the wider research community.In addition to building upon the successes of our original objectives by studying the phase behaviour of novel amphiphiles and complex lipid mixtures, and the development of millisecond and microsceond pressure-jump synchrotron X-ray studies of lyotropic transitions, we also plan to develop the following areas of research within the renewed Platform grant, which we have identified as timely and important challenges at the Life/Physical Sciences interface:i) Understanding Membrane Asymmetry;ii) Protein Control of Lipid Membrane Morphology;iv) Regulation of Lipid Biosynthetic Pathways.iv) Lipid Mesophase Engineering Rules for Biomedical Imaging Applications.
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