The research in Narcis-Adrian Petriman’s group focuses on the structural and functional characterization of ciliary supercomplexes.
Cilia are hair-like organelles that extend from the surface of cells to facilitate motility and sensory perception. Dysfunctional cilia cause rare human diseases known as ciliopathies, which affect multiple organs and lead to clinical manifestations such as blindness, deafness, obesity, intellectual disability, and renal and respiratory dysfunction.
The functions of cilia are closely linked to their architectural framework, which contains conserved structures such as the microtubule-based axoneme, the ciliary membrane, the transition zone (TZ), and the intraflagellar transport (IFT) system that traverses the axoneme powered by molecular motors.
Our current interest lies in the TZ, a multimolecular superstructure at the base of cilia that regulates the selective diffusion and transport of proteins and lipids between the cytosol and the ciliary compartment through an as-yet-unknown gating mechanism.
We hypothesize that the structure of the TZ holds the key to understanding this gating mechanism, and we aim to elucidate it using integrative approaches that combine classical structural biology techniques with structure prediction tools and crosslinking/mass spectrometry.
Head of research: Assistant Professor
Researchers and research group: Narcis-Adrian Petriman Lab
A complete list of publications by Narcis-Adrian Petriman can be found .
