Cagla Sahin receives a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Novo Nordisk Foundation
Cagla Sahin has received a Postdoctoral Fellowship for research abroad in bioscience and basic biomedicine from the Novo Nordisk Foundation
Cagla's project is entitled "The superstructural biology of RNA-binding amyloid-like proteins in neurodegeneration and memory formation" and will be funded for a period or four years, for a total of 5.2M Swedish Kronor. The research will be carried out in the Landreh group at MTC and at Copenhagen University.
The Novo Nordisk Foundation has awarded postdoctoral fellowships to 16 talented researchers from Denmark and the other Nordic countries. The Foundation celebrated the researchers at an event held at the Foundation’s offices in Hellerup attended by the researchers’ families, friends and collaborators.
The Project: The superstructural biology of RNA-binding amyloid-like proteins in neurodegeneration and memory formation
Inside cells, proteins are busy fulfilling specific tasks by binding to other molecules, and wrong interactions can lead to disease. When the brain stores information, certain proteins self-assemble together with other molecules into large scaffolds that bind copies of different genes. These scaffolds resemble protein assemblies called “amyloid” that are a hallmark of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Despite being similar, one protein family forms functional, “good” structures, and the other pathogenic, “bad” ones. Here, we use mass spectrometry, a technique that allows us to weigh proteins, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy that gives structural information, to follow their interactions to understand what makes protein assemblies in the brain bad or good. Which parts of the proteins bind together? Can we interfere with these interactions? Answering these questions will help us to better understand the relationship between normal brain function and disease.