Eva Pebay-Peyroula
Professor II, Biomolecular and structural chemistry
Forskningsinteresser
My main interest is to decipher the molecular mechanisms underlying transport among biological membranes. For that, I try to understand the relationships between structures of membrane proteins at atomic details and their mechanisms of action. I studied for a long time the ADP/ATP carrier that imports ADP into mitochondria and exports ATP to the cytolsol after being synthesized. Since 2015, in collaboration with Karsten Fischer at UiT, we study the phosphate transporter that is located in the plast af Toxoplasma gondii. Understanding its function at atomic details would open the way to the design of drugs targeting this microorganism or other types of organisms from the Apicomplex family. After spending some time in optimizing the preparation of pure proteins (overexpression, pruification, characterization,...) we try in parallel to crystallize the transporter to solve the structure by X-ray crystallography, and also to optimize the sample for cryoElectron microscopy. Currently we have low resolution maps obtained by cryoEM that we try to improve. A large part of experiments are done in Grenoble where the tools for structural biology are available. Some characterizations of the protein were done at Norstruct (Chemistry Department, UiT).