Post-doctorant: Julien Mignon -« Exploration of the conformational and amyloidogenic landscapes of IDPs by combining biophysics with molecular dynamics »

Résumé

Unnoticed for 25 years after the establishment of the Anfinsen’s dogma, intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) endorse specialised and ubiquitous roles across the biomolecular realm. In the last two decades, they have indeed emerged as a highly diversified and essential group of proteins involved in a tremendous array of pathophysiological processes. However, their inherent structural heterogeneity, binding promiscuity, and susceptibility to self-assembly still challenge the characterisation of their disorder-structure-(dys)function relationships. Opening the dialogue between experimental (in vitro) and computational (in silico) approaches can pave the way towards the elucidation of their dynamic conformational and amyloid properties from the macroscopic to the nanometric scale. Through selected examples in human and marine lifeforms, this seminar aims at illustrating how the combination of spectroscopy and microscopy with modelling and molecular dynamics allows to explore the structural landscape, interaction repertoire, and environmental behaviour of IDPs relevant to varied biological contexts such as neurodegeneration, phase separation, and biomineralisation contexts