Ryan Wilson Rose Hills
Open-State Structure of the LRRC8A:C Anion Channel
Every cell in the human body must carefully regulate its size. Volume-regulated anion channels (VRACs) are proteins that help cells manage this by controlling the flow of ions across the cell membrane. Mutations in VRACs have been linked to disorders affecting the brain, eyes, blood vessels, and bones — underscoring how critical these channels are.
Despite decades of research, scientists still don’t fully understand how VRACs open and close. One leading hypothesis suggests that lipid molecules physically plug the channel, and that activation involves displacing them — but this has never been directly observed.
My project aims to capture the first images of VRACs in their open state using cryo-electron microscopy, a technique that visualizes proteins at near-atomic resolution. I am engineering two versions of the channel that stay locked open, then imaging them to test the lipid-plugging hypothesis directly.
Message To Sponsor
I am deeply grateful for the support of my summer research. As a student with a passion for understanding how the world works at a molecular level, having funding for this project means I can continue pursuing the questions I care most about. Uncovering how such a biologically critical protein works is exactly the kind of problem worth dedicating a summer to, and this scholarship makes that possible.