Dr. Christopher Kelly

Fat may be stored or mobilized from the lipid droplets within our cells. The lipid droplets are filled with oily triglycerides and coated with surfactants of proteins and phospholipids. The surfactants form a membrane that regulates the fats depending on the energetic needs of the cell. Natural membranes include thousands of different molecules in a complex balance with the surface tension, membrane curvature, supramolecular complexation, and intracellular molecular sorting. We are developing microscopy, spectroscopy, and computational methods to measure how membrane biophysics regulates lipid metabolism. With super-resolution polarized localization microscopy, four-color fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy, course-grained molecular dynamics simulations, and machine learning-guided protein-binding simulations, we are contributing biophysics expertise to the Barber Integrative Metabolic Research Program.