Dr. Nir Fluman

Proteins are the microscopic machines of the cell, and the cell makes about a million new protein molecules every minute. They almost always need to fold in order to function, yet protein folding is an immensely complex task, and many proteins are prone to pathological misfolding, which can cause disease. Evolution has therefore equipped all organisms with an arsenal of sophisticated strategies to avoid protein misfolding and to eliminate proteins that failed to fold. Very little is known about how these processes occur with regard to membrane proteins, which make up a quarter of all proteins in nature and are involved in nearly every biological process. Mutations that cause membrane protein misfolding are involved in numerous diseases, stressing the urgency of better understanding this field. We study the fundamental principles of protein folding, misfolding, and degradation in the membrane.