Research Area: Lipid metabolism and signaling in eukaryotes
Research Interests:
Biotechnological and medical applications, from biofuel production to vaccine development, rely on the knowledge provided by fundamental lipid research.
Lipids are key components of cellular membranes playing structural and signalling roles. Cells also use lipids as an efficient and safe way to store energy.
We use budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) as a model organism and a combination of approaches from the fields of Biochemistry, Cell Biology and Genetics to investigate:
- how lipid biosynthesis is regulated
- how lipid pools are distributed in eukaryotic cell
- how lipid drugs that target cellular membranes impact lipid production, distribution and signalling
Our research program focuses on
- Phosphatidic acid biosynthesis
- Phosphatidic acid and diacylglycerol pools
- Targeting membranes by ether lipid drugs
- Ether lipids biosynthesis