“…Because transmembrane proteins differ substantially in their shape and hydrophobic thickness depending on their final subcellular destination and function (Sharpe et al, 2010;Quiroga et al, 2013;Lorent et al, 2017Lorent et al, , 2020, a particularly soft and deformable membrane environment can provide a suitable environment for their folding and assembly in macromolecular complexes (Radanović & Ernst, 2021) and may also reduce the barrier for membrane protein integration via molecular invertases (Wu & Rapoport, 2021). In fact, the machineries that insert and remove membrane proteins into and from the ER, respectively, induce a local thinning of the membrane, presumably to lower the energy barrier for insertion and extraction (Wu & Rapoport, 2021).…”