Tenure Track Assistant Professor Thibault Viennet, iNANO/Dept. of Chemistry, Aarhus University

“Unstructural” biology to understand protein regulation

It is well established that about 40% of all protein regions do not adopt stable 3D structures: they are disordered. The most striking feature of these disordered domains is that they are targets of post-translational modifications much more than structured domains. These modifications are critical regulatory processes and imbalances often lead to disease. However, the mechanisms by which these modifications affects protein disordered regions to change their function are largely elusive. Studying the conformation of disordered regions and their dynamics presents a challenge that is intractable by many structural biology techniques but can be tackled by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). In my lab, we use NMR to explore the molecular determinants of protein regulation by phosphorylation, especially in transcription factors, a class of proteins with particularly high amount of disorder and elusive regulatory motifs.

Tenure Track Assitant Professor Anna Louise Duncan, iNANO/Dept. of Chemistry, Aarhus University

Molecular modelling of complex and crowded biomembranes

Biological membranes are composed of myriad types of lipids and crowded with many and diverse membrane proteins. It is not clear why our cellular membranes are so complex, nor is the impact of this complexity fully understood.  In this talk, I will show how we can use molecular simulations to untangle molecular interactions within biomembranes and relate these to larger-scale membrane behaviour and function.