Abstract 3048 Identifying the components of membrane contact sites without doing any experiments

This century has witnessed the brith of membrane contact site field. A major driver has been the identification of proteins that inhabit interfaces between organelles. In this talk I will describe many methods for finding and manipulating information in databases to predict new membrane contact site proteins. I will focus on the discovery of lipid transfer proteins and report on our ongoing work using models predicted by AlphaFold to identify new hydrophobic cavities. We find no or very few new dedicated lipid transfer proteins of the ‘box + lid' type originally described almost 60 years ago.