Photo by Anne Baumann
Researcher Anne Baumann was awarded a two month FEBS Short-Term fellowship to visit the group of Professor Ludmilla Morozova-Roche at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Umeå University in Sweden. The host group has excellent expertise in revealing molecular and cellular mechanisms of amyloid toxicity, which involves identification of the toxic amyloid species and determination of how they cause cell damage and death. This group also performs live cell imaging by using AFM with an inverted fluorescent microscope to see how the exposure to amyloid structures affects shape and mechanical properties, a method that would be very valuable to establish in our group of protein scientists.
Anne Baumann visited the group to study the cytotoxicity of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) at various conditions on a SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cell line. To elucidate the effect of TH on cells live cell atomic force microscope (AFM) imaging was applied. AFM provided information on how TH affected the cell shape and mechanical properties of the membrane. Furthermore, the effect of α-synuclein aggregation, a system that is well studied by the group in Umeå, was investigated on TH aggregation and localization, notably at the membrane.
By Anne Baumann (researcher, KGJN/Biorecognition)
