Por Patricia Faísca (DF-FCUL).

Sumário: A small fraction of all protein structures characterized so far are entangled. The challenge of understanding the properties of these knotted proteins, and the why and the how of their natural folding process, has been taken up in the past decade with different approaches, such as structural characterization, in vitro experiments, and simulations of protein models with varying levels of complexity.  In this seminar I will provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in the filed of knotted proteins, and highlight the work we have been developing in our group by putting it into perspective in the context of the main experimental and theoretical results.

Short-bio: Patrícia FN Faísca is Assistant Professor of Physics at the Physics Department of the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, and principal investigator at BioISI – Biosystems and Integrative Sciences Institute. She received her PhD (Physics) in 2002 at the University of Warwick (UK), as part of the Gulbenkian PhD Program in Biology and Medicine. She has a broad interdisciplinary background comprising Physics, Biology, Mathematics and Chemistry. Her research on protein folding and aggregation is based on the use of molecular simulations, especially of coarse-grained models. Her current research interests focus on the folding mechanisms of knotted proteins, and on the mechanisms of protein misfolding and aggregation in a disease-related context. More information at http://webpages.fc.ul.pt/~pffaisca/.