Lucie Delemotte

Lucie Delemotte’s research focuses on understanding, predicting, and modifying membrane protein function. Membrane proteins are the windows of the cell, they make it possible for cells to experience changes in their environment, such as the presence of hormones or drugs, or a shift in the ionic concentrations of the extracellular medium.

Like other proteins, membrane protein function is governed in large part by their structure, i.e. their 3-D shape. Recent developments, however, point to the role of dynamical properties in shaping protein function. Lucie Delemotte’s lab thus conducts molecular dynamics simulations of membrane proteins such as ion channels, G-protein coupled receptors and solute transporters, resolving how these proteins move in response to stimuli. Often, since the time scales accessible to regular simulations are too short to sample interesting processes, her lab designs and applies so-called enhanced sampling protocols that make it possible to collect trajectories over long-enough timescales. The noisy data generated is then analyzed using dimensionality reduction, clustering and other data analysis methods, eventually resulting in mechanical models of protein function.

Membrane protein dysfunction can lead to diseases such as epilepsy, cardiac arrhythmias, cancer and many more. By characterizing membrane protein function, we can understand the molecular basis for the dysfunction and the Delemotte lab is working on developing methods to design new modulators (i.e. molecules with a desired effect) which use novel modalities.