EXTRAORDINARY IBMB SEMINAR, Friday, March 15th 10:00 AM | Dr. Florian Schur

The actin cytoskeleton defines emerging cellular properties, including cell motility, via a reciprocal crosstalk between actin filament geometry and actin binding protein (ABP) activity. Similarly, virus assembly pathways are defined by geometrical principles that regulate virus particle architecture. The principles that govern the construction of pleomorphic viruses, such as poxviruses or retroviruses, show increased complexity due to their morphological variability, where the local context of protein-protein interactions can have subtle but important effects on virus particle stability and function.

These examples of the actin cytoskeleton and virus assembly highlight that a full understanding of how higher-order protein interactions define emerging properties can only be obtained when they are studied within the appropriate contextual setting, such as within the cell or assembled virus particles.

In our lab we develop novel approaches in cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), including specimen preparation, data acquisition and image processing to study proteins in such complex environments and at different scales to integrate structural, contextual, and functional information.

In this seminar I will give examples of how our work provided novel insights into the regulation of a key actin filament nucleator and the assembly of Vaccinia virus, an important member of the poxvirus family.

Keywords: cell migration, actin cytoskeleton, virus assembly, cryo-electron tomography, image processing

“Florian Schur studied Molecular Biology at the University of Vienna and then performed his PhD at the EMBL Heidelberg under the supervision of John Briggs.

After a short postdoc still at EMBL, he joined the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in 2017 as an Assistant Professor, where his group develops new cellular structural biology workflows to study the molecular mechanisms underlying cell migration and pleomorphic virus assembly.”