Sujata Sharma

Biography

I lead a group at The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health at The University of Melbourne focused on membrane protein engineering, structure and function. My work involves the development of new, generic protein engineering methods that can be applied to facilitate the application of biophysical methods to traditionally challenging membrane protein targets such as G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). After completing my Ph.D. on the relaxin and INSL3 receptors at The University of Melbourne in 2007, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Andreas Pluckthun in Zurich, Switzerland until the end of 2011. While in Zurich I invented a novel method, called CHESS, for the directed evolution of detergent-resistant membrane proteins. GPCRs stabilised with this method can be produced recombinantly in bacteria, purified and stored in detergents and experimentally probed as if they were highly stable soluble proteins. Such stabilised GPCRs can be applied to X-ray crystallography and NMR for structural studies, but can also be used to probe the molecular determinants of ligand binding, ligand-receptor selectivity and for drug discovery. T

Research Interest

 Dentistry