Seminar Prof. Carlos Baiz - Interfacial dynamics in crowded lipid membranes probed using 2D IR spectroscopy

Lipid membranes are much more than barriers between cell compartments, they are integral components of the cell involved in key functions such as sig naling, transport, and sensing. Membranes are composed of hundreds of different lipid species and contain thousands of proteins. The biophysical implications of membrane heterogeneity are not fully understood. Our group uses 2D IR spectroscopy to probe the local hydrogen-bond dynamics at the lipid-water interface. In this talk I will discuss our current work on using transmembrane peptides with backbone isotope labels to probe the degree of water penetration into the bilayer, as well as using a range of peptide concentrations to “crowd” the lipids. Our results show that the presence of polar residues in membrane proteins increase the degree of water penetration within the bilayer. In the last part of the talk, I will discuss data analysis and denoising methods based on machine learning that can use to further improve the signal-to-noise.

Relevant papers:

J. Phys. Chem. A 2022, 126, 35, 5881–5889

J. Phys. Chem. A 2022, 126, 23, 3816–3825

Acc. Chem. Res. 2020, 53, 9, 1860–1868

J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2020, 11, 10, 4093–4098