Osphocholine for this group of detergents, or the proper names to refer to unique alkyl chain lengths with 10 (decyl phosphocholine), 12 (dodecyl phosphocholine, abbreviated as DPC), 14 (tetradecyl phosphocholine), and 16 (hexadecyl phosphocholine) carbons. These are also known beneath their industrial name foscholine (FC), which includes FC10, FC12, FC14, and FC16. Forty years soon after the very first applications ofDOI: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.7b00570 Chem. Rev. 2018, 118, 3559-Chemical Reviews alkyl phosphocholine 155141-29-0 manufacturer detergents in structural biology,36 a sizable variety of MPs happen to be studied in these micelles. From the sheer statistics, alkyl phosphocholines have turned out to become quite profitable, especially in solution-state NMR spectroscopy. Figure two shows the relative contributions of diverse techniques to solving MP structures, along with the surfactants which have been employed to identify these structures. Dodecyl phosphocholine has been applied to get ca. 40 with the MP structures determined by solution-state NMR, generating it one of the most often employed detergent for this technique. Remarkably, even so, it has been successful in producing only 1 on the MP structures determined by crystallography. The requirements for solutionstate NMR and crystallography are very various. For the former, the main criterion for deciding on a certain detergent would be the solubility on the protein, and higher resolution with the resulting NMR spectra. For the latter, restricting the conformational space in answer is vital for crystallization. Highly flexible proteins may be really favorable for solution-state NMR and result in well-resolved spectra; but, they likely will not crystallize. The powerful bias toward alkyl phosphocholine in solution-state NMR and against this class of detergents in crystallography may possibly possibly indicate some bias toward a lot more dynamic proteins being studied by solution-state NMR, or it may recommend that DPC interferes with crystallization. In any study of MPs in artificial lipid-mimicking environments, one wants to address the question of the biological relevance with the sample. Are MPs in alkyl phosphocholine detergents within a conformation that resembles their state within a native membrane, or, conversely, do these detergents introduce systematic structural perturbations Are MPs functional in alkyl phosphocholine detergents, and how do distinctive detergents examine within this respect Answering these queries normally terms is tough, due to the fact MPs vastly differ in their topology (-helical, -barrel), size, and complexity. Nonetheless, in the substantial physique of information collected more than the last 4 decades, common trends emerge regarding the functionality of this broadly utilized class of detergents. The aim of this Overview should be to provide an overview from the properties, strengths, and weaknesses of alkyl phosphocholine detergents for MP research. This Critique is organized as follows. We 1st recapitulate the properties of lipid bilayer membranes and their interactions with MPs. We then talk about how detergents differ from lipids, and how the MP interactions are thereby altered. In section three, we focus on obtainable information for the functionality of MPs in alkyl phosphocholine detergents. Section four discusses in detail many examples of experimental research of -helical and -barrel MPs and reveals how alkyl phosphocholines retain or distort the native structure, interactions, and dynamics. Section five discusses how molecular dynamics (MD) simulations contribute to our underst.