This award will enable Professor William Allison of the University of California, San Diego to collaborate with Dr. Masasuke Yoshida of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. The research will be aimed at defining the functional roles of amino acid side chains that have been implicated to be essential for the activity of mitochondrial and bacterial F1-ATPase, a complex, but important component of energy transducing membranes. The focus will be on the functional role of two tyrosine residues in the F1-ATPase from bovine heart mitochondria. The study will employ the techniques of chemical modification and site-directed mutagenesis. Use of the in vitro mutagenesis approach, in combination with chemical modification techniques, will provide important information on the structure-function relationship in the F1-ATPases. Dr. Allison has pioneered the use of chemical modification techniques for the study of ATP synthase and Dr. Yoshida is an expert on the technique of site-directed mutagenesis.
