简介

The long-term goal of our research is to understand the function and the working mechanism of membrane-bound transport proteins. In general, transporters use different types of energy sources to actively move specific substrates, such as inorganic ions or small, organic molecules across the membrane into or out of cells. Recently, significant progress has been made towards our understanding of the molecular architecture through the availability of high-resolution structures of several transporters. However, the actual transport mechanism(s) remain elusive. Our aim is to combine functional and structural evidence in order to obtain an understanding of how these transport proteins work.