Publications related to Capturing Complex Protein Gradients on Biomimetic Hydrogels for Cell-Based Assays

Accessible and highly observable gastrointestinal organoid model systems for studying host-pathogen interactions

Traditional cell cultures have long been fundamental to biological research, offering an alternative to animal models burdened by ethical constraints and procedural intricacies, often lacking relevance to human physiology and disease. Moreover, their inabi ...

EPFL2024

Opportunities and challenges in design and optimization of protein function

Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa Correia, Casper Alexander Goverde

The field of protein design has made remarkable progress over the past decade. Historically, the low reliability of purely structure-based design methods limited their application, but recent strategies that combine structure-based and sequence-based calcu ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Engineering novel protein interactions with therapeutic potential using deep learning-guided surface design

Anthony Marchand

Proteins are foundational biomolecules of life playing a crucial role in a myriad of biological processes. Their function often requires interplay with other biomolecules, including proteins themselves. Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are essential for ...

EPFL2024

From Sequence to Dynamics to Function: Computational Design of Allostery and Ligand Selectivity in G-Protein Coupled Receptors

Mahdi Hijazi

The phenomenon of allostery, a general property in proteins that has been heralded as "the second secret of life" remains elusive to our understanding and even more challenging to incorporate into protein design. One example of allosteric proteins with gre ...

EPFL2024

Improved microfluidic transcriptome based screening methods

Christoph Merten, Leonie Kolmar, Xiaoli Ma, Hongxing Hu

The invention provides microfluidic screening systems for the identification of compounds or compositions influencing cellular transcriptomes. The invention is predicated upon taking into account differences in newly synthesized mRNA in contrast to so call ...

2024

Toward universal cell embeddings: integrating single-cell RNA-seq datasets across species with SATURN

Maria Brbic, Ziang Li

Analysis of single-cell datasets generated from diverse organisms offers unprecedented opportunities to unravel fundamental evolutionary processes of conservation and diversification of cell types. However, interspecies genomic differences limit the joint ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Recording physiological history of cells with chemical labeling

Kai Johnsson, Julien Hiblot, Ling Hai

Recordings of the physiological history of cells provide insights into biological processes, yet obtaining such recordings is a challenge. To address this, we introduce a method to record transient cellular events for later analysis. We designed proteins t ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2024

Deciphering the nature of cell state transitions in single cells using quantitative modeling of temporal dynamics

Alex Russell Lederer

Cells are the smallest operational units of living systems. Through synthesis of various biomolecules and exchange of signals with the environment, cells tightly regulate their composition to realize a specific functional state. The transformation of a cel ...

EPFL2024

Multiscale Porosity Microfluidics to Study Bacterial Transport in Heterogeneous Chemical Landscapes

Francesco Carrara, Jiande Zhou

Microfluidic models are proving to be powerful systems to study fundamental processes in porous media, due to their ability to replicate topologically complex environments while allowing detailed, quantitative observations at the pore scale. Yet, while por ...

Wiley2024

Bioengineering functional organoid models across scales

Tania Hübscher

The last two decades have seen the development of organoid models for many different tissues and organs. Organoids are three-dimensional organ-mimetics derived from stem or progenitor cells comprising various specialized cell types, resembling the architec ...

EPFL2024

Investigating the intra-molecular and inter-molecular effects of post-translational modifications on intrinsically disordered protein regions and structured protein regions

Zhidian Zhang

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) play a pivotal role in regulating protein structure, interaction, and function. Aberrant PTM patterns are associated with diseases. Moreover, individual PTMs have a complex interaction with each other, known as PTM c ...

EPFL2024

Development of tools and methods for protein identification: From single molecules to in vivo applications

Salome Riccarda Püntener

As the fundamental machinery orchestrating cellular functions, proteins influence the state of every cell profoundly. As cells exhibit significant variations from one to another, analyzing the proteome on a single-cell level is imperative to unravel their ...

EPFL2024

The dynamic genetic determinants of increased transcriptional divergence in spermatids

Christina Ernst

Cis-genetic effects are key determinants of transcriptional divergence in discrete tissues and cell types. However, how cis- and trans-effects act across continuous trajectories of cellular differentiation in vivo is poorly understood. Here, we quantify al ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Mechanisms and functions of protein S-acylation

Françoise Gisou van der Goot Grunberg, Laurence Gouzi Abrami, Francisco De Magalhães Sarmento R De Mesquita

Over the past two decades, protein S-acylation (often referred to as S-palmitoylation) has emerged as an important regulator of vital signalling pathways. S-Acylation is a reversible post-translational modification that involves the attachment of a fatty a ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Microfluidic systems for infectious disease diagnostics

Thomas Lehnert, Martinus Gijs

Microorganisms, encompassing both uni- and multicellular entities, exhibit remarkable diversity as omnipresent life forms in nature. They play a pivotal role by supplying essential components for sustaining biological processes across diverse ecosystems, i ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2024

Antibodies expand the scope of angiotensin receptor pharmacology

Patrick Daniel Barth, Shuhao Zhang

G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are key regulators of human physiology and are the targets of many small-molecule research compounds and therapeutic drugs. While most of these ligands bind to their target GPCR with high affinity, selectivity is often l ...

2024

Multimodal transcriptomic atlases of mouse spinal cord injury

Matthieu Pierre Gautier

A spinal cord injury (SCI) triggers a cascade of molecular and cellular responses involving inflammatory cell infiltration and cytokine release, apoptosis, demyelination, excitotoxicity, ischemia, and the formation of a fibrotic scar surrounded by an astro ...

EPFL2024

Predicting protein interactions using geometric deep learning on protein surfaces

Freyr Sverrisson

In the domain of computational structural biology, predicting protein interactions based on molecular structure remains a pivotal challenge. This thesis delves into this challenge through a series of interconnected studies. The first chapter introduces th ...

EPFL2024

Characterization of the gut-bone marrow axis through bile acid signaling

Alejandro Alonso Calleja

Communication between the intestine and other organs such as the lungs, brain or bones is mediated by several metabolites, like short-chain fatty acids or bile acids, that relay information about nutritional and microbiota status. Bile acids are endogenous ...

EPFL2024

Fluorescent fatty acid conjugates for live cell imaging of peroxisomes

Luc Reymond, Manon Sandra Bardyn, Fabien Kuttler, Daria Korotkova, Triana Amen, Milena Maria Schuhmacher

Peroxisomes are eukaryotic organelles that are essential for multiple metabolic pathways, including fatty acid oxidation, degradation of amino acids, and biosynthesis of ether lipids. Consequently, peroxisome dysfunction leads to pediatric-onset neurodegen ...

Nature Research2024