Mandala Lab

Spatial deconstruction of the plasma membrane The plasma membrane of cells is known to be heterogeneous with regards to the spatial distribution of proteins and lipids. The segregation of molecular species in the cell membrane into specific domai...

Read our work on protein-rich domains in the plasma membrane:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lipid composition and mechanical force underlie multi-modal regulation of Piezo1 gating Piezo1 ion channels are widely expressed cellular mechanosensors. They adopt an intrinsically curved shape when closed and are thought to open when mechanical forces applied to the membrane favor a mo...

Happy to share our latest work on Piezo:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A @pnas.org study from the MacKinnon lab finds that proteins contact each other in a variety of ways to form self-clusters, highlighting the diversity of chemical interactions nature uses in the formation of protein assemblies in cell membranes.

Here we use electrically polarized vesicles to observe what happens to a voltage sensor when it sits in a membrane potential, and how that information is used to turn off the channel.
This is my last publication on these channels as a postdoc. Read more here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our ability to send electrical signals rapidly to distant parts of the body depends on membrane proteins called voltage-dependent ion channels. These channels have voltage sensing domains that sense the voltage difference across the cell membrane and open or close the channel accordingly.