Shining Light on Metallomembranes - POB seminar

This month we will have the pleasure to host Saranya Pullanchery  ,Post-doctoral Researcher in the Laboratory for fundamental BioPhotonics (LBP).

For organizational purposes (if you want to eat pizza!), please confirm your participation using this Doodle.

Hope to see you there,
The team of the EPFL Photonics Chapter
 
Abstract:
Metal ions in our body can form complexes with lipids in the cell membrane. Such interactions are chemically specific. Trace metal ions such as Cu2+ and more abundant ions such as Ca2+ form chemically distinct complexes with negatively charged lipids. We do not yet completely understand the role of such ion-lipid complexes in our body. Understanding the molecular mechanism of ion-lipid complexes is essential toward finding their physiological relevance.
In this talk, I will show how we utilize the interface-selective technique, vibrational sum frequency generation (SFG) spectroscopy to understand molecular level details of ion-lipid interactions. SFG spectroscopy uniquely provides vibrational spectrum of the interface.  We obtain information about surface charge and surface structure from the interfacial spectrum of water. Such details are typically not accessible using bulk spectroscopic techniques.  Combining the information from SFG spectroscopy and fluorescence microscopy, we find key differences in the mode of interaction of Cu2+, Zn2+ and Ca2+ ions with negatively charged lipid membranes.