In the July 14 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Professors Stephen White in UCI's Department of Physiology & Biophysics, Douglas Tobias in UCI's Department of Chemistry, and Gunnar von Heijne of Stockholm University report a combined biological, biophysical, and computational investigation of the mechanism of insertion of hydrophobic helical peptides in membranes. They find that helices that are much shorter than the hydrophobic thickness of the membrane can be inserted efficiently, and they establish the biophysical principles that underlie this remarkable result.