Imaging and probing biomolecular assemblies at nanometre resolution

Reductionists, biomimetic and/or synthetic model systems are powerful tools to understand complex biological machinery. We use, e.g., reconstituted lipid bilayers to study self-assembly and membrane pore formation by immune proteins (perforins) that punch holes in virus-infected and cancerous cells; and assemblies of unstructured, disordered proteins to investigate mechanisms underlying the selectivity of transport into and out of the cell nucleus. Our favourite tool for such studies is atomic force microscopy (AFM), for its ability to resolve biomolecules at ~1 nm spatial resolution in aqueous environment. We complement it by physical/computational modelling and other microscopy approaches, including electron and fluorescence microscopy.