MB&B Seminar: “Structures and Regulation of Membrane Transporters”

Poul Nissen is a professor of protein biochemistry at Aarhus University (AU). He received his PhD in 1997 in Aarhus followed by a three-year postdoc at Yale University, where he worked on the first structures of the ribosome with Peter Moore and Tom A. Steitz (Nobel Prize in chemistry 2009). He established his own lab at Aarhus University in 2000-2001 with a primary focus on the structure and function of membrane proteins. In 2006 he was appointed full professor and since 2013 he has been the director of DANDRITE, the Danish node of neuroscience of the Nordic-EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine. Poul Nissen studies the structure and mechanism of membrane transporters using primarily cryo-EM and membrane protein crystallography as well as collaborative research on enzyme kinetics, single-molecule studies, electrophysiology, and molecular dynamics simulations. A major topic is P-type ATPase that include ion pumps and lipid flippases, but he studies also sodium-dependent amino acid and neurotransmitter transporters as well as supramolecular structures of neuronal membranes addressing cooperative networks governing e.g. action potentials and synaptic functions.