Page 14 - Hormel Report 2023

Amer Alam, PhD
“Structural biology occupies a central role in understanding fundamental details of cellular functioning by illuminating the chemistry that governs essential physiological functions, pinpointing disease mechanisms, and facilitating therapeutic
development.”
Amer Alam
14 | THE HORMEL INSTITUTE // Structural Biology of
Membrane Transport
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
The Alam lab uses a combination of structural biology approaches (primarily cryo-EM), biochemistry, cell biology, and
antibody and small molecule discovery, to study the cellular machinery involved in lipid and fatty acid transport and homeostasis pathways. Dysfunction of these systems lies at the heart
of several devastating, often fatal pathologies ranging from rare inherited diseases such as Zellweger’s syndrome and adrenoleukodystrophy to metabolic and neuropathic diseases including Alzheimer’s Disease, diabetes, and cancer. Our group has wide-ranging collaborations with a diverse panel of expert scientists in computational biology, cancer biology, and complementary bio- physics techniques like Mass Spectrometry and Electron Paramagnetic Resonance, allowing us to target challenging biological problems using a multidisciplinary approach.
Understanding the Role of the Lipid Transport Protein ABCA7 in Alzheimer’s Disease Progression.
Our group has determined the first high reso- lution structures of human ABCA7 in multiple
states and provided fundamental insights into its substrate translocation mechanisms. This project was funded in part by a recently completed
R21 grant (PI: Alam) from the NIH Institute on Aging. We have also discovered antibody frag- ments against ABCA7 in our lab and continue pursuing structure-function studies of ABCA7 and its complexes with relevant interaction partners.
Understanding the Structural Basis for Fatty Acid Transport by Peroxisomal ABC Transporters.
This project focuses on members of the D family of ABC transporters and their role in transport of very long chain fatty acids into peroxisomes for beta oxidation. Several neurological and meta- bolic diseases are associated with dysfunction of ABCD family proteins and our group has been at the forefront of deciphering the molecular bases for their functionality, having determined among the first high resolution structures of ABCD1
in multiple states and, to date, the only ones in a lipid environment. We continue to study the