Molecular Physiology of the Cell

Abdoulaye BARRY is “Chargé de recherche” of FNRS

Abdoulaye Barry, who joined the lab last November after his PhD thesis in Marseille, was informed by the FNRS he got a three-year postdoc grant as “Chargé de Recherche”. He couldn’t get better news indeed, congratulations to him!

The research work of Abdoulaye deals with the ubiquitylation and intracellular traffic of amino acid transporters, in yeast and human cells.

Summer Biopark news

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Elie Saliba joined the lab

A new graduate student, Elie Saliba, just joined the lab to accomplish a PhD research work. Elie is Lebanese and has obtained his master in 2011 at University Saint Joseph in Mar Roukos, Lebanon. During his master, Elie did a 6-months internship in the “Biologie du Cancer du Sein” laboratory at ’Institut Curie” of Paris. He was then Research Assistant at the “Molecular Genetics and Biodiversity” lab of Saint-Joseph University in Lebanon.

Elie’s research work deals with the mechanisms stimulating the ubiquitylation and endocytosis of amino acid transporters.

30th anniversary of M Grenson’s paper reporting the first isolation of rsp5 mutants of yeast

In 1983, Marcelle Grenson published her famous paper describing the “inactivation” by ammonium of the yeast Gap1 permease, and the isolation of a mut2 mutant in which this inactivation is defective [1]. Later studies [2] showed that the mut2 mutation (also named npi1) alters the RSP5 gene encoding the HECT-type ubiquitin ligase enzyme [3] responsible for the ubiquitylation of all thus far reported plasma membrane proteins of yeast, including Gap1 [4].

Grenson (1983) – Inactivation-Reactivation Process and Repression of Permease Formation Regulate Several Ammonia-Sensitive Permeases in the Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Eur J Biochem 133, 135-139.

Marcelle Grenson

Elisa Llinares won a “2012 Solvay award”

The “Solvay Award” is awarded annually by the Solvay group to 2nd and 3rd cycle students who have realized a high-quality work within the Faculty of Science or the Faculty of Applied Sciences of ULB or VUB. This year one of the 3rd cycle awards was attributed to our former PhD student Elisa Llinares for her research work on the yeast Ypq membrane transporters of the yeast S. cerevisiae. Elisa is now employee of Bone therapeutics, a spin-off company of ULB. Congratulations to Elisa for this award !

“Membrane transport proteins” meeting in Louvain-la-Neuve

We have participated and contributed to the “Membrane transport proteins” meeting organized by our colleague François Chaumont in Louvain-la-Neuve (April 26th) with the help of the Belgian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

“Model organisms” conference in Namur

We have attended the “Model Organisms” conference organized by NARC in Namur on April 19th. The speakers included Pr. Paul Nurse, who received the Nobel prize in 2011 for his work on cell division control (CDC) genes in yeast.