• Outline
• Contents
• Endorsements
• From the Preface
• Table of Contents

Advanced Praise:

'…a remarkable job of synthesizing an incredible amount of up-to-date information. The book will be extremely useful to research scientists, graduate students, and even undergraduates interested in understanding how biological membranes function.’

Hiroshi Nikaido, University of California, Berkele

‘…a well-balanced, thorough, and up-to-date treatment…This timely and beautifully illustrated book should become a standard reference text.’

Chuck Sanders, Vanderbilt University and Associate Editor of Biochemistry

‘Luckey’s book succeeds…in providing both the advanced student and the researcher in the field with an integrated picture, combining the results of earlier studies with current advances at the cutting edge of research.’

Jürg Rosenbusch, Biozentrum, University of Basel

‘…should be on the shelf of any scientist whose research might involve biological membranes…For those of us who work with membranes, the book will be a well-thumbed source of information.’

Lin Randall, University of Missouri

“This sophisticated new text presents biological, chemical and physical perspectives at an advanced level while being a pleasure to read. It is very up to date, with an organization that is novel but logical.”

Stan Parsons, University of California Santa Barbara

One of the most exciting and rapidly advancing fields in biochemistry in recent years has been the effort to understand the biological functions of membranes at the molecular level.  The importance of this field can be seen, for example, when we realize that a large fraction of the drugs we consume is targeted to either membrane components, such as cholesterol, or membrane proteins, such as receptors or channels.  Yet there has been absolutely no textbook that covers this most relevant area.  This is to a large extent due to the enormous range of topics to be covered, from the physical chemistry of lipids to the 3-D structures of transport proteins.  In this book, Mary Luckey did a remarkable job of synthesizing an incredible amount of up-to-date information.  The book will be extremely useful to research scientists, graduate students, and even undergraduates interested in understanding how biological membranes function.

Professor Hiroshi Nikaido, U. C. Berkeley

How does the ultrathin skins of a cell and its subcompartments manage to perform the many and vital functions of biological membranes? Insulating the cell and charging its battery; locating, selecting, transporting and concentrating specific nutrients; communicating over short and long distances; ensuring the plasticity and motility of a cell are only a few selected examples illustrating the diversity. To understand these phenomena and their dynamics at a molecular level requires the correlation of function with structure at near-atomic resolution. The amphipathic characteristics of membrane constituents, partly hydrophilic, partly hydrophobic, have long frustrated such studies. In recent years, a combination of a wide variety of sophisticated techniques has allowed successful structure determinations at high resolution to be performed, resulting in a burst of specialized, technical reports. So how does an author condense the now copious flow of information on characteristics and methodologies into a comprehensive survey? Professor Luckey has, courageously (I should say, heroically), decided to write a single-author book, integrating the results of biological, biochemical and biophysical methods into a treatise of some 300 pages. The result is a well-balanced overview of the structures and the various biological activities of membranes which a multi-author book cannot provide. The subjects are clearly structured, the figures informative and vivid: I like, for instance, the representation of the flexibility of phospholipid molecules by the (more or less) drunken sailors. Luckey’s book succeeds, I believe, in providing both the advanced student and the researcher in the field with an integrated picture, combining the results of earlier studies with current advances at the cutting edge of research. The layout of the book is clear, its bibliographies concise, and the index allows rapid consultation also of specific topics.

Jurg Rosenbusch, Biozentrum, University of Basel

Mary Luckey's "Membrane Structural Biology" provides a well-balanced, thorough, and up-to-date treatment of membrane proteins and their bilayer environment.  This is a badly needed contribution that encompasses most of the many breakthroughs that have taken place over the past 15 years in membrane protein structural, computational, and cell biology.  This timely and beautifully illustrated book should become a standard reference text that is well-suited for use in both graduate level and advanced undergraduate courses on biological membranes.

Professor Chuck Sanders, Vanderbilt University

Membrane Structural Biology by Mary Luckey provides a wealth of information about biological membranes.  The volume impressively combines lucid summaries of basic principals and concise explanations of many recent developments in our understanding of membranes.  Important background about concepts or techniques is effectively presented in “boxes” that supplement the main text.  The text is enriched by descriptions of the history of key concepts or advances.  The burgeoning amount of structural information about membrane components, particularly three-dimensional structures of membrane proteins, is effectively incorporated into every aspect of this volume.

Gerald L. Hazelbauer, Professor and Chair, Department of Biochemistry, University of Missouri

This membrane biochemistry text is the welcome replacement to the superb but now out-of-print 1989 text by Robert Gennis (Biomembranes: Molecular Structure and Function).  Unlike texts on the subject that have appeared in the interim that are multi-authored or highly specialized, Mary Luckey’s new text achieves breadth without sacrificing depth, is coherent, current, comprehensive, and highly readable for graduate students. The foundations of membrane organization are presented in chapters 1-4, as well as an introduction of experimental systems and methods.  The succeeding chapters delve into the folding of membrane proteins during membrane assembly, and structure-function relationships of membrane proteins that serve as metabolic enzymes, transporters, or signal transducers. Principles are elaborated in detail with many examples from the current literature, each accompanied by abundant, vivid color illustrations, elucidating mechanisms of molecular function.  Other novel and expedient topics include bioinformatics of membrane proteins, diffraction and simulation methods and their applications, and crystallography of membrane proteins.
The text includes a wealth of adeptly communicated information that will expedite both the teaching and learning aspects of a course on Biomembranes. 

Professor Rosemary Cornell, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia

Membrane Structural Biology by Mary Luckey combines the best features of a well-written textbook and a valuable reference.  The volume should be on the shelf of any scientist whose research involves or might involve biological membranes.  It will be a true resource in teaching basic biochemistry and an appropriate text for advanced, membrane-specific courses.  For those of us who work with membranes, the book will be a well-thumbed source of information and one often loaned to students, postdocs or fellow faculty member wanting concise information about almost any aspect of membrane biology. 

Linda L. Randall, Wurdack Professor of Biochemical Sciences, University of Missouri

The tremendous progress made over the last decade in our understanding of biomembranes calls for a new gestalt in a book about their structure and function. The need for such a book was apparent as I labored to capture the explosion of information about the structure and organization of biological membranes for my course on membrane biochemistry. Applications of new techniques and whole new methodologies have changed both how we acquire knowledge of the membrane and how we view it. For many years, the polymorphism of lipid mixtures and the difficulties in crystallization of membrane proteins caused a scarcity of structural detail. Now sophisticated diffraction analysis allows description of fluid lipid bilayers, and high resolution structures have been determined for a variety of membrane proteins. Each new high resolution structure of a membrane protein that graces a journal cover offers new insights into membrane functions. And yet, a full understanding of each new structure and its lipid environment is built on foundations of membrane biochemistry that derive from basic physical and life sciences.

This book combines a physicochemical analysis of the membrane milieu with the latest structural biology on membrane lipids and proteins to give an exciting portrayal of biomembranes. The book’s title, Membrane Structural Biology, emphasizes the successes of structural biology in revealing exciting details of many membrane components. To see the impact of structural biology on biochemistry textbooks, one need only compare a biochemistry book from 25 years ago with a current textbook, in which colorful and detailed molecular structures illustrate the functions of biomolecules and mechanisms of complex biochemical processes. A textbook on membrane biochemistry can only now approach that transformation to molecular detail, drawing from x-ray crystal structures, lipid diffraction and liquid crystallography, and computational modeling.

To cover these advances and their foundations in one comprehensive volume, this book moves from basic membrane biochemistry to detailed examples of membrane structural biology. It includes numerous new topics, such as phase diagrams of lipid raft mixtures, reconstitution using bicelles and nanodiscs, binding domains of amphitropic proteins, effects of elasticity on folding of membrane proteins, a biological scale for identification of transmembrane helices, bioinformatics and proteomics of membrane proteins, and joint refinement of x-ray and neutron diffraction data for lipid bilayers. It offers explanations of techniques as varied as statistical methods for prediction of transmembrane sequences, surface effects in binding and kinetics, protein folding studies, liquid crystal theory, and molecular dynamics simulations.

Written at a level appropriate for advanced students and scientists new to the field, Membrane Structural Biology assumes a background familiarity with the concepts covered in an undergraduate biochemistry course. Although it includes a wide range of material in a broad and rapidly moving field, the book is not encyclopedic. Nor does it provide the thousands of references to the scientific papers on which it is based. That literature is vast, but fortunately it is readily accessible with the search engines now available. Readers who want to learn more can get started with the key references to seminal papers and reviews provided for each chapter. They can study the papers cited in the figure captions and can easily search for other contributions from those authors. A thorough familiarity with the examples described in the book will provide the reader with a solid foundation for further studies, including the exploration of other important topics such as membrane fusion, chemotaxis, endocytosis and membrane recycling.

CHAPTER. 1. Introduction: membrane components; paradigms: the Hydrophobic Effect (including thermodynamic principles) and the Fluid Mosaic Model (including historical dev), Shifts in the paradigm: Lipid Rafts (variation within the bilayer), and Crowding (variation across the bilayer, complexes); organization of book.   

CHAPTER 2.  Diversity of membrane lipids: structure, polymorphism, diversity, domains, rafts.

CHAPTER 3.  Tools for studying membrane components: Detergents and Model systems: detergent properties and applications;  Model systems: monolayers, bilayers: black films, patch clamping, liposomes, micelles, bicelles, blebs and blisters, nanodiscs.

CHAPTER 4.  Proteins in or at the bilayer: types and definitions; peripheral proteins: examples, interactions with bilayer; insertion of proteins and peptides, including toxins and ionophores; constraints of bilayer on TM segments, roles of amino acids, secondary structure; lipid requirements of proteins; protein-lipid interactions, especially from EPR studies.

CHAPTER 5.  Bundles and Barrels: a-helical membrane proteins– BR, photosynthetic reaction center; b-barrels—porins: OmpF, PhoE, and LamB; FhuA and FepA.

CHAPTER 6.   Functions and Families: Description and functions of membrane enzymes, transporters and receptors; Classification in Families; Bioinformatics of Membrane Proteins: Predictions using hydropathy profiles, sequence motifs, topology grammar; Genomic analysis;  proteomics; structure predictions for b-barrels.

CHAPTER 7.  Folding and biogenesis of Membrane Proteins: In vitro folding studies, examples of BR and OmpA; in vivo biogenesis: targeting, translocation, insertion, and topogenesis.  Misfolding diseases.

CHAPTER 8.  Diffraction and Simulation. Modeling lipids:  Liquid crystallography, Molecular Modeling: molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo; Crystallography of membrane proteins; Lipids in high resolution structures of membrane proteins.

CHAPTER 9.  Membrane Enzymes and Transducers: OMPLA, prostaglandin H2 synthase (COX), formate dehydrogenase, rhodopsin (a G-protein coupled receptor), mechanosensitive channels

CHAPTER 10. Transporters and Channels: LacY and GlpT, ADP/ATP carrier, aquaporin, potassium channels, calcium ATPase.

CHAPTER 11. Membrane Protein Assemblies: ATP synthase, cytochrome bc1, cytochrome oxidase, Sec translocon, Vitamin B12 uptake (BtuBCDF and TonB), drug efflux systems (Sav1866, EmrE, AcrB, AcrA, TolC).

CHAPTER 12. Themes and Future Directions: Oligomerization, Conformational changes, Motifs and Patterns