Welcome to new PhD student Line Marie Christiansen
Line Marie Christiansen has been accepted as PhD student per 1. February 2019 in Group Leader Poul Nissen's group. Line Marie will be working on establishing an expression and purification protocol for ATP9A and fellow human P4-ATPase ATP9B. Further on in the project, she will work on biochemical characterization of ATP9A and ATP9B, as well as yeast orthologue Neo1, and structural studies by negative-stain electron microscopy and cryoEM, to determine their structures, which will contribute to the expanding the current understanding of the transport mechanism of the P4-ATPases.
Further PhD research description:
The distribution of lipids between different cellular membranes and their leaflets is tightly regulated to ensure correct cellular function. The P4-ATPases or lipid flippases are vital for this regulation and translocate specific lipids towards the cytosolic leaflets. The mechanism for lipid translocation as well as the specific substrates for several putative lipid flippases remains a mystery. The brain enriched mammalian P4-ATPase ATP9A has yet to be characterized for its role in lipid translocation, but has so far been implicated in recycling from endosomes to plasma membrane (Tanaka, 2016).