Topic: Developing structural interactomics and its application in cell biology

Speaker: Fan Liu,  Professor

Host: Feng Rao, Associate Professor

Time: 10:00-11:30 am; September 13, 2024 (Friday)

Venue: Room 301 of Yidan Library

Abstract：

Proteins in all biological systems are highly organized in three-dimensional space, forming membrane-enclosed or membraneless compartments, signaling pathways, dynamic assemblies, and stable complexes. Many of these structures are only viable in their native environment, making them recalcitrant to traditional biochemical characterization. Proteome-wide cross-linking mass spectrometry offers the opportunity to capture the interactions and spatial arrangement of proteins without having to extract them from their complex biological system. Over the years, we’ve advanced cross-linking mass spectrometry by developing experimental methods and software tools and generated tens of thousands of PPIs from various biological systems, such as mitochondria, synapses, cells and virus particles. These data reveal numerous aspects of living systems - for example protein subcellular localizations, interactions, and architectures of suprabiomolecular machineries. Furthermore, these findings inform functional follow-up studies to further characterize the newly discovered protein structures, interactions, and spatially resolved networks, using approaches from structural biology, molecular biology, cell biology, neuroscience, and informatics.

Introduction：

Fan graduated from Fudan University in Shanghai with a B.Sc. in Biology. Afterwards she joined the lab of Prof. Dr. Mike Goshe at North Carolina State University and obtained her PhD in Biochemistry in 2013. Fan did her postdoc in the lab of Prof. Dr. Albert Heck (Utrecht, The Netherlands).In 2017 Fan joined the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) in Berlin as a group leader for Structural Interactomics and head of the proteomics research platform. In addition to her position at the FMP, Fan is jointly appointed as Professor for Structural Interactomics at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Fan has been awarded by many funding sources, including the most prestigious funding scheme STG-2020 from European Research Council.