Columbus Labs

The research aims of the Columbus laboratory are two-fold:

To address the challenges in membrane protein structural biology
To investigate the structural determinants of bacterial pathogen - host interactions mediated by membrane proteins.

Specifically, the structures of neisserial Opa proteins, which interact with host proteins and are directly involved in bacterial pathogenesis, are of interest.

However, in order to investigate the structure of these proteins, as well as the complexes with the host receptors, methods for accelerating structure determination are being developed. [Read more→]

Recent Headlines

Recent Publications

Identification and removal of nitroxide spin label contaminant: Impact on PRE studies of α-helical membrane proteins in detergent»
Kroncke B.M. and Columbus L. Protein Science 21: 589–595 (2012). NMR paramagnetic relaxation enhancement (PRE) provides long-range distance constraints (∼15–25 Å) that can be critical to determining overall protein topology, especially where long-range NOE information is unavailable such as in the case of larger proteins that require deuteration. However, several challenges currently limit the use [...]