NARILIS lunch seminar | Thorben CORDES, LMU Biocenter, Munich, Germany

We are pleased to invite you to a seminar given by

Prof. Dr. Thorben CORDES

Professor and Group leader at LMU Biocenter, Munich, Germany

His seminar is entitled:

Novel optical spectroscopy methods for mechanistic studies of active membrane transporters

Membrane transporters are the prime targets for current and future pharmaceutical drugs due to their involvement in numerous cellular processes that can cause human diseases, bacterial pathogenicity, drug resistance, and other medical phenomena. Whereas the identification and structural analysis of transporters has moved at great pace, there is still an urgent need to better understand their molecular mechanisms so as to facilitate the development of often needed novel therapies, e.g., through the identification of inhibitors. Only single-molecule-based approaches could facilitate a next breakthrough in mechanistic understanding of transporters via simultaneous real-time observation of transport, energy usage and structural changes. My group has recently started to use and develop single-molecule approaches to characterize in particular structural dynamics. In this contribution I will provide an overview of our mechanistic contributions to the transporter field including ABC importers[1,2], exporters[3] and non-transporting ATPases[4]. Finally, I will also present novel ideas for biophysical assays that allow characterization of structural and functional dynamics in transporters.[5,6]

[1] G. Gouridis et al., Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 22 (2015) 57-64; [2] M. de Boer et al., eLife 8 (2019) e44652; [3] F.A. Husada et al., EMBO Journal 37 (2018) e10056; [4] G. Gouridis et al., Cell Reports 28 (2019) 1-11; [5] E. Ploetz and E. Lerner et al., Scientific Reports 6 (2016) 33257; [6] Mächtel et al., Research in Microbiology online (2019) doi: 10.1016/j.resmic.2019.09.004

Invited by Prof. Jean-Pierre Gillet, UNamur, URPhyM