Membrane Proteins: "We want to explore the issue that there is no “one size fits all” solution"

William Walker is a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and a visiting researcher at Lund University. In this short interview, he explains why the soon to be established working group, Membrane Proteins, was formed.

What do you want to explore?

We would like to explore the unique challenges involved in research on the structural biology of membrane proteins. Specifically, we are interested in exploring topics that address the issue that there is no “one size fits all” solution to resolving membrane protein structures. Much attention will be given to different methods and techniques and considerations relevant to different families of membrane protein.

What do you hope will be the impact of the work?

We aim to make structural biology research on membrane proteins more accessible to a broader community of scientists whom are not structural biologists but may anyway have an interest in structural biology questions to the membrane proteins that they do research on. The establishment of a virtual wiki-type resource on best practices, methodological pipelines, and what works and what doesn’t work, will contribute towards enriching the impact of the Working Group

Why is such a group needed now?

Our working group is needed now to coalesce the local community of specialists and potential end-users and push to the forefront research on membrane proteins with respect to the coming prominence of the local MAX-IV and ESS facilities. The LINXS organization provides an excellent platform for interested research to focus efforts on building up and leveraging the community of membrane protein researchers, to forge new collaborations and facilitate the spread of ideas.

What research frontiers are you pushing?

We aim to utilize our network to contribute towards streamlining best practices in sample preparation and quality control, with respect to research materials and methods, in order to provide greater knowledge and knowledge transfer on how best to deal with the challenges in working out research issues relevant to the structural biology of membrane proteins. This will contribute towards a greater ability to make the most out of the state of the art facilities in our neighborhood (i.e. MaxIV and ESS) facilitating design and implementation of research questions previously unobtainable.

The working group Membrane Proteins will fall under the theme Integrative Structural Biology.

William Walker is a researcher in molecular biology and a visiting researcher at the Department of Biology at Lund University.