Lipids at the Gate: Dewetting, Demixing, and Memory in Ion Channels ft. Vincenzo Carnevale

About this event

Lipids at the Gate: Dewetting, Demixing, and Memory in Ion Channels

with Dr. Vincenzo Carnevale

Brown University

ABSTRACT: An ion channel sits between two fluids near phase boundaries: water confined in its pore, which can be liquid or vapor, and a membrane near demixing. I will show that one ingredient, the preference of different channel conformations for different lipids, connects three scales. Lipid tails entering the BK pore stabilize a dry, non-conducting state that the protein alone cannot sustain. Near-critical lipids couple distant channels, giving clustering, cooperativity and hysteresis. And weak channel-lipid coupling stores long-term memory in single-channel records without breaking the Markov models used to analyze them.

BIOGRAPHY: Vincenzo Carnevale is an associate professor at the Institute for Computational Molecular Science at Temple University in Philadelphia, where his group works on the physics of membrane proteins. He received his PhD from SISSA in 2007 and trained as a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. Much of his career has been spent on the activation mechanism of voltage-gated ion channels, combining molecular simulation, statistical mechanics and, more recently, generative models for protein design. His work is supported by the National Institutes of Health.

With refreshments from Panera Bread