The influence of fusion peptides FLAG of Dengue virus and HA of Influenza H1N1 in model membranes

Abstract

Lipid vesicles have been widely used to study aspects in organized biological events such as interactions of biomolecules for clinical interests into membranes. The interaction of membrane fusion peptides with lipid bilayer aims to understand the relationship between the target molecule and the membrane during the fusion of biological membranes via fusion peptides present in viruses. Membrane fusion peptides are part of virus, serving as a gateway to the virus access into the cell membrane. In particular, these peptides have higher affinity to anionic membranes and achieving lipid bilayers mainly composed by negatively charged lipids has extreme importance to be able monitoring the proceedings via fusion peptides. In this project, our focus is the study of physicochemical aspects of lipid bilayers fusion of different lipid compositions with membrane fusion peptides of Dengue virus (FLAG) and influenza (HA). A new growing method of giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) by PVA(polyvinyl alcohol) swelling will be employed, obtaining GUVs composed exclusively of charged lipids. In addition, we use techniques such as optical microscopy in phase contrast mode and fluorescence, isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC), dynamic light scattering (DLS), turbidity and fluorescence spectroscopy in order to track and monitor the effect of membrane fusion not only between GUVs but also between large (LUVs) and giant (GUVs) unilamellar vesicles.