Projects

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an endocrine disease in children and young adults in which the immune system is specifically triggered to destroy the insulin-producing pancreatic beta-cells. Defects in both central and peripheral immune tolerance are at the basis of this autoimmune pathology. Lately, posttranslational modifications (PTM) of islet-cell proteins are put forward to generate neo-autoantigens and induce autoreactive T-cell responses. The ...

Blood vessel formation (angiogenesis) is crucial in physiology, but also contributes to pathologies (eg cancer, ocular disease). Various vascular (growth) factors controlling angiogenesis have been identified, a prominent example being the key endothelial cell (EC) growth factor VEGF. However, the host lab recently identified an entirely novel regulation of angiogenesis, relying on metabolic rewiring of the ECs to ensure generation of energy ...

Leukocyte migration is crucial during inflammation. It is regulated by a network of molecules including adhesion molecules, leukocyte attractants such as chemokines and their receptors. Although most leukocyte attractants have been identified, posttranslational modifications affecting their activity are still being discovered. These modifications may increase or decrease the activity of attractants and may even result in the generation of ...

A diverse group of principal widespread diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), type II diabetes mellitus and many others, shares a single common feature referring to the constant build-up of protein deposits, which causes various symptoms of growing severity (inflammation, tissue degeneration and full organ disfunction). Aberrant aggregation is promoted by short hydrophobic segments, located within ...

Proteins carry out the majority of functions in a living cell. Yet proteins are often subject to naturally occurring modifications of their basic structure, which happen after the protein has been synthetized in the cell. These modifications are termed post-translational modifications (PTMs) and can have substantial effects on protein function and activity. Therefore, these PTMs are highly relevant to our understanding of the cell in health ...

There are currently no reliable methods to quantify the differential occurrence of by mass spectrometry identified PTM-carrying proteins across samples. I here therefore propose to create the statistical means to obtain a proteome-wide quantitative view of PTMs. These novel statistical means can, after fine-tuning, be implemented in the existing ionbot tool.

After translation, the function of the synthesized protein is mainly configured by the tight cooperation between post-translational modifications (PTMs) and protein-protein interactions. PTMs contribute to the proteome diversity, are involved in regulation of numerous metabolic processes, and have an essential role in acting as molecular switches: by changing the chemical properties of a protein, they can alter its activity, localization and ...

Protein aggregation is a common pathological hallmark of a large number of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as many metabolic diseases and cancer. This phenomenon results from the self-assembly of short regions of mainly hydrophobic amino acids (APRs) into stacked structured sheets called steric zippers. Mounting evidence suggest that protein post-translational modifications (PTMs) can often increase or ...