(together with Prof. Mosbacher, IPT and Dr. Benoit, PSI) Nucleic Acid based therapies are gaining momentum although the targeted delivery of nucleic acid to cells is very demanding. SmartCoats are protein-based carriers which are stable in plasma and are not immunogenic. They shall deliver their nucleic acid cargo specifically to…

(together with Prof. Allain, ETHZ and Prof. Wiegand RWTH Aachen) The Sulfolobus islandicus multi-copy plasmid pRN1 encodes a particular replication protein endowed with both primase and helicase activities. The primase domain of the replication protein is of the archaeoeukaryotic type and consists of the highly conserved catalytic domain (Prim_Pol) and…

The marine thermophilic archaeon Nanoarchaeum equitans possesses a monomeric primase encompassing the conserved domains of the small catalytic and the large regulatory subunits of archaeoeukaryotic heterodimeric primases in one protein chain. The recombinant protein primes on templates containing a triplet with a central thymidine, thus displaying a pronounced sequence specificity…

For ELISAs and Western Blot antibodies are labelled with fluorophores or with enzymes. For the conjugation with enzymes a classic but rather unspecific coupling with glutaraldehyde is commonly used. The reaction with glutaraldehyde leads to the formation of large aggregates of antibodies and enzymes with varying quality. In this project…

Efficient and reliable delivery of drugs to the colon has not been achieved yet. Nevertheless, colonic delivery is needed for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, a malady with increasing incidence. The difficulty in consistent colonic delivery is caused by the individual and circumstantial variability of the human digestive tract…

The human gut microbiome has an important nutritional role by enabling the digestion of carbohydrates mostly stemming from plant cell walls. A balanced a diverse composition of the microbiome is crucial for gut health and influences the well-being. The groups of Prof. Imanidis (IPT) and Prof. Lipps have developed a…

Outer membrane vesicles (OMV) are small vesicles (diameter ~ 100nm) which are released by gram-negative bacteria. As the surface of the vesicles is very similar to the surface of the bacteria the vesicle may trigger an immune response against the bacteria while being safe as they are non-replicative and non-infectious.

Primases play a crucial role in DNA replication and are possible drug targets for proliferating cells such as cancer cells. The specificity of primases for their template is limited and only poorly investigated. Using a previously published protein binding microarray (PBM) dataset (Soffer et al., 2021) we could define the…

Esma joined the ICB on August 12th. Find out about her research activities and interests here.