Welcome to Javier F. Carrera, new visiting bachelor student in Poul Nissen group

Javier Fernández Carrera started in Poul Nissen's group, where he will be working together with postdoctoral fellow Rasmus Kock Flygaard. Javier F. Carrera's project aims to determine the structure of human membrane proteins NKCC1 and SLC12A9/CIP1. These proteins belong to the SLC12 family of electro-neutral chloride transporters, however, as opposed to NKCC1 no transport function has been assigned to CIP1. One hypothesis exists that CIP1 might serve a regulatory function to modulate the transport activity of NKCC1. Indeed, NKCC1 and CIP1 show high degree of sequence conservation, and since NKCC1 is known to exist as a homodimer, we are working with the hypothesis that CIP1 regulates NKCC1 activity by forming heterodimers, which somehow mediates an inhibitory mechanism. Thus, we seek to apply structural techniques, e.g. cryo-EM combined with single-particle analysis, to gain insights on whether CIP1 itself is a homodimer and if indeed it can form heterodimers with NKCC1.