报告人
Sarah Perrett (柯莎), PhD
Principal Investigator,
Institute of Biophysics, CAS
Chaperoning Protein
Self-Assembly:
from Prions to Phase Transitions
主持人：
Magdalena Koziol博士
报告时间：
2024年9月12日
10:00-11:00
报告地点：
北京脑科学与类脑研究所
二期X102报告厅
报告语言：
英语
报告摘要
Chaperoning Protein Self-Assembly: from Prions to Phase Transitions
The ability of proteins to self-assemble into beta-sheet-rich amyloid fibrils is considered universal, although certain polypeptide sequences have a particularly high propensity to adopt these conformations. The formation of amyloid fibrils is often harmful and associated with disease, but there are also proteins for which amyloid structure represents the functional conformation. The phenomenon of protein self-assembly results in species with dramatically different sizes, from small oligomers to large fibrils; the kinetic relationship between these species is challenging to characterize. We have used a variety of biophysical approaches, including single molecule fluorescence and microfluidics, to investigate the structure of fibrils of the yeast prion protein Ure2 and their detailed mechanism of assembly. We have also exploited the Ure2 prion domain as a scaffold to form biomaterials that self-assemble under mild conditions allowing preservation of enzyme activity within the resulting nanomaterial. In our more recent work, my lab has been applying single molecule fluorescence techniques to study self-assembly and liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) of the protein Tau. Our findings provide new insights into the mechanism of protein phase separation, the conversion from functional liquid droplets to pathological aggregates, and the ways these processes may be regulated by chaperones in the cell.
Professor Sarah Perrett is a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where she has led a research group since 2003. She is also a Senior Member of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge and a Visiting Scientist at the Cambridge Centre for Misfolding Diseases.
Sarah studied Natural Sciences, specializing in Chemistry, at the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD in Protein Chemistry in 1997, supervised by Prof. Sir Alan Fersht FRS. She then held a Research Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge before moving to Beijing in 2000, after a year of full-time Mandarin Chinese language study at the National University of Singapore.
In 2015 she was awarded the Chinese Academy of Sciences Young International Scientific Collaborator Prize. She was also awarded an OBE for services to UK/China relations in the scientific field in the 2015 Queen’s New Year Honours List. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2017. Sarah is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Essays in Biochemistry. Her research interests include mechanisms of protein folding, amyloid formation and prion propagation. She has published over 100 research articles and has edited three books.
