Director’s guest: Salvador Ventura, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain – “Structural insights into bacterial and human functional amyloids”

Abstract

Amyloids display a highly ordered fibrillar structure. Many of these assemblies appear associated with human disease. However, the controllable, stable, tunable, and robust nature of amyloid fibrils is exploited by different organisms for functional purposes. Here I will describe the properties of two novel functional amyloids: i) An extracellular prion-like extracellular amyloid of staphylococcus aureus involved in biofilm remodeling and human infection. ii) A human prion-like protein, for which its Cryo-EM structure in the fibrillar state provides novel insights into the molecular bases of muscular atrophy and how alternative splicing controls protein supramolecular assembly in mammals.