Contact:Nel-Mari Loock
- 021 808 2652
Location: Wallenberg Research Centre, STIAS
Katja Petzold, Associate Professor of Biophysics at Karolinska Institute
and STIAS Fellow will present a public lecture with the title:
Dancing RNA: How Molecular Dynamics Explains Function
Abstract
Ever since the mRNA vaccine tackles Covid19, RNA has gained the
spotlight. I will talk about how we can understand and manipulate RNA
function by looking at its molecular structure and how this wiggles or
dances, called dynamics. I will shortly introduce RNA and its structures
and how one can look at it with different spectroscopies. Then, we will
try to see what RNA dynamics has to do with function and how we can use
this knowledge to develop next-generation medicines. Examples will be
given on a cancer regulator microRNA and the biggest RNA machine, the
ribosome.
Katja Petzold, born in 1981, received a Master degree in
Biochemistry/Biotechnology at the Martin-Luther University Halle,
Germany in 2005. She received her PhD in Medical Biophysics from Umeå
University, Sweden in 2009 working with Prof. Jürgen Schleucher. After
that, she did a short postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Gert H. Kruger
at UKZN in 2009/2010 and a longer a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof.
Hashim M. Al-Hashimi at University of Michigan, US, studying RNA
dynamics and the structure of RNA excited states from 2010 to 2013. In
2014 she was appointed Assistant Professor of Biophysics at Karolinska
Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, where she is currently an Associate
Professor. She has received numerous prizes, such as the Wallenberg
Academy Fellow in Engineering, the Söderberg Fellow in Medicine, the
Future Research Leader grant from the Foundation of Strategic Research
as well as this year the Hugo Theorell price in Biophysics. Together
with her postdoctoral advisor, she described the first RNA excited
states (Nature 2012, 2015). Her group’s research focuses on the study of
RNA dynamics of disease related systems, such as ribosomes or microRNA
(Nature 2020), even including viruses. Furthermore, we develop NMR
methodology for dynamics studies, RNA sample production and RNA in-cell
NMR.
Please join us for this hybrid lecture by registering here before 15 November 2022 for either in-person and online attendance.