HPI – Hellenic Pasteur Institute

Prof. Dr. Socrates Tzartos
Vassilissis Sofias Avenue 127
11521 Athens
Greece

The Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Immunology at the Hellenic Pasteur Institute is working on the human nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) and on diseases in which these receptors are involved. The last few years most of the efforts involve the use of eukaryotic expression systems (yeast, baculovirus and mammalian) for the expression of the extracellular domains (ECDs) of several human muscle and neuronal AChR subunits. They then use these ECDs to study AChR structure, to understand the autoimmune disease myasthenia gravis (which is caused by auto-antibodies against muscle AChR) and to develop antigen-specific treatments of this disease. In order to improve the solubility, conformation, ligand binding affinity and antigenic structure of these ECDs we construct various mutations and/or link the ECDs with flexible peptides. Next partner >