Almost 30 years ago scientist have identified a protein complex with a key role in delivering membrane proteins to the endoplasmatic reticulum. However, the mechanism of this process was difficult to understand due to the seemingly contradictory experimental evidence obtained on this complex. A collaborative effort between the Ban group at ETH, the Deuerling group at the University of Konstanz and the Shan group at Caltech now used interdisciplinary approaches to unravel the mechanism that involves NAC's dual mode of action in which it simultaneously blocks SRP access and at the same time keeps it tethered so that it can sample nascent chains. These results explain how membrane proteins can be targeted to the endoplasmatic reticulum efficiently and with high fidelity. Their findings have been published in Science  in the article entitled "Mechanism of signal sequence handover from NAC to SRP on ribosomes during ER-protein targeting ".

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