Imaging the future
Research of the Max Planck-NCBS Center on Lipid Research focuses on the intricate interplay between lipids themselves and with the proteins in the bilayer to capture these interactions both in the living cell and in reconstituted model systems.
This will be facilitated by the new imaging methods that can observe cellular processes with high spatio-temporal resolution and deliver quantitative readouts.
Attempts have been initiated to place the lipids in the context of developmental processes and come to grips with how lipids contribute to cell polarity and homeostasis.
It will also be important to develop new lipid probes and tools to study lipid function both in and ex vivo. Understanding cellular processes will demand the development of sophisticated reconstitution methods to reduce the cellular machineries to their core components and unravel how they function.
MPI-CBG and NCBS complement each other in this respect. Both sites also have superb computational experts to predictably model the processes under study. A concerted effort is underway to employ the cutting edge shotgun mass spectrometric platform to unravel lipidomic blood signatures to understand why Indians are so prone to diabetes type 2, a scourge formankind worldwide.
There are 3 main modules and 9 fields. Click the bars to open and learn more.
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Basic Research
Structure of membrane
What is the role of actin cytoskeleton, different bilayer lipids and proteins in regulating membrane sub-compartmentalization?Signaling
How do bilayer and signaling lipids contribute to signal transduction processes across cell membranes?Proteomics, Lipidomics
How do lipids regulate specific membrane proteins?Cell Polarity, homeostasis
Apical and basolateral plasma membrane domains have different lipid and protein compositions. How do these biomolecules contribute to cell polarization and maintenance?Lipid metabolism
Lipids are emerging as major players in cell metabolism and nutritition. How do they perform these functions?
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Technology & Resources
Proteomics, Lipidomics
Which methods can we use to study protein-lipid interactions and metabolic pathways?Technologies
How can we synthesize lipid probes that can be followed in cells and tissues and mimic the properties of their native counterparts?Lipid databases
The Max Planck-NCBS Center on Lipid Research will support ongoing efforts to come up with functional and effective databases for lipids by organizing international workshops where open issues and future developments are discussed.
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Biomedical Research
Diabetes
The Max Planck-NCBS Center on Lipid Research will organize screening of blood samples from Indian children and adults to identify multiparametric lipidomic signatures to find out how they differ from other ethnic groupsLiver Steatosis
Retinis Pigmaentosa