Figure 1:

Membrane mimicking environments for investigating membrane proteins by NMR spectroscopy. Micelles, bicelles and nanodiscs are used to keep the protein soluble, which would make them suitable to solution state NMR but their total molecular weight when incorporating proteins such as ABC transporters limits this approach. Oriented solid state NMR exploits the spontaneous alignment of bicelles in magnetic fields. The most universal approach is based on MAS-NMR, which enables experiments directly on proteoliposomes as demonstrated in this paper for the ABC exporter MsbA.