Dr. Sakmar and his colleagues believe that new technologies and capabilities will make significant interdisciplinary work possible to advance the understanding of how heptahelical receptors really work. One of the aims of the SakmarLab is to assemble a toolbox that will allow us to study heptahelical receptors in the normal environment of the cell membranes.
    The SakmarLab now has several converging technology platforms in place to study heptahelical receptor chemistry and biology

  • All atom and coarse grain MD (molecular dynamics) simulations of GPCRs in membrane bilayers,
  • UAAM (unnatural amino acid mutagenesis) of GPCRs using amber codon suppression technology,
  • NABBs (nanoscale apolipoprotein bound bilayers) as membrane mimic support structures for GPCRs,
  • SMD (single-molecule detection) of GPCRs in self-assembling oriented-tethered bilayers using TIRF (total internal reflection fluorescence) microscopy or in NABBs using microfluidics,
  • HTS (high-throughput screening) or high content functional assays to characterize expressed mutant GPCRs.
These new tools in combination with a variety of analytical methods to evaluate specific receptor structural heterogeneities should provide detailed information about how receptors actually function in the cell membrane.