Corporate Agreements

The MPEC maintains confidential agreements with the corporate sector that do not compromise their Intellectual Property.

Key Intellectual Property

Consultants have played a key role in the discovery of major membrane protein biology, and/or in the development of procedures to understand membrane proteins at the molecular level.

  • Robert Stroud and his group have studied many membrane protein systems seeking characterizations and crystal structures. They have determined over 40 high resolution structures of membrane proteins at atomic resolution.
  • Robert Edwards and his group have been key to discovery of the basis for vesicular transport that is key to neuronal signaling.
  • Charles Craik has pioneered the selection of Fab fragments from phage displayed libraries. These are used as partners for co-crystallizations of membrane proteins.
  • Peter Walter is co-discoverer of the signal recognition particle (SRP) directed targeting of membrane proteins to the endoplasmic reticulum which he has vastly elaborated. Walter and Stroud reported the structural mechanism of targeting membrane proteins to the endoplasmic reticulum membrane by the SRP-SR interaction (10). Walter is a key investigator in the elaboration of the response to unfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum that leads to huge expansion of the endoplasmic reticulum. These systems are ones that we intend to harness in the MPEC.
  • Jonathan Weissman has pioneered methods for globally defining the proteins that associate to form complexes in a number of organisms. The efforts are most mature in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, where a combination of immunoprecipitation of affinity tagged proteins and in vivo screening strategies, such as yeast two-hybrid approaches and its derivatives. 
  • Ronald Kaback is world renowned for his extensive studies of the Lactose permease. Over many years he has been a pioneer in membrane biology. Kaback recently was coauthor with Iwata of the structure determination of the Lac permease (11, 12). Cell free expression systems have been applied to certain cases (13).
  • Collaborator James Holton a leading young scientist in x-ray diffraction methods development.