ZIP Metal Ion Transporters

Unit I. Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology 1. Structure determination of a bacterial ZIP in lipidic cubic phase 2. Cell-based metal transport assay for animal and plant ZIPs 3. Measurement of metal binding affinity and transport activity in ZIP transporters using spectroscopic methods 4. Considerations in production of the (prokaryotic)  ZIP family transporters for sturcural and functional studies 5. Metal-protein interactions investigated using model systems: thermodynamic, spectroscopic and computational methods 6. Expression, purification and crystallization of the extracellular domain of a mammalian ZIP4 7. Getting Zinc Into and Out of Cells 8. In-silico modeling of ZIP9 (TBD) Georgios Scheiner-Bobis Unit II. Cellular Function and Regulation 9. Methods to visualise zinc transporter proteins of the SLC39A family in cells 10. Assessing metal ion transporting activity of ZIPs: intracellular zinc and iron detection 11. In vitro studies for studying manganese transport and homeostasis 12. In vitro studies to evaluate zinc transport ability of ZIPs through analyzing ZNT1 and MT expression responses 13. The optimized method to detect mouse erythrocyte membrane ZIP metal transporters by immunoblotting analysis 14. Dynamic internalization and trafficking of zinc transporter 15. Assessing the impact of varying zinc levels in the transcription profiles of human neurons 16. Quantifying homomeric and heteromeric ZIP complexes using fluorescence correlation and fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy 17. ZIP9-directed androgenic tetra peptides (TBD)