August 07, 2021

#47 with Dr. Simone Prömel & Dr. Ines Liebscher

1 hour 13 minutes

About Dr. Simone Prömel

Simone Prömel is currently a professor of cell biology at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. Being a biochemist by training, she completed her Ph.D. at the Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, UK. During this time, she discovered her love for Adhesion GPCRs and started delineating the molecular mechanisms of the Adhesion GPCR Latrophilin-1.

These extraordinary receptors, about which there was not much known other than that they are huge and somehow play important roles in health and disease, fascinated her so much that she continued working on them when she started her own lab at Leipzig University. There she focused on the different modes of action of Adhesion GPCRs and found that they do not only mediate classical G protein signals into cells but can also communicate solely via their N termini.

Today, she and her team are working on the questions of how Adhesion GPCRs integrate the different signals on a molecular level and how these are translated into physiological functions in various model organisms. Together with Ines Liebscher, Simone is leading an EU-funded COST Network on Adhesion GPCRs: CA18240 Adher´n Rise.

About Dr. Ines Liebscher

Dr. Liebscher is a Professor at the Rudolf Schönheimer Institute of Biochemistry at the Medical Faculty of the Leipzig University. During her medical studies in Leipzig, she had her first encounter with an orphan GPCR as the subject of her MD thesis. Being faced with the vast unknown biochemical and pharmacological territory that would be helpful to study orphan receptors she enrolled in the MD/Ph.D. program of Leipzig University. Her postdoctoral work leads her to investigate a whole family of orphan receptors: adhesion GPCRs.

With the little knowledge on these receptors available, there were multiple questions to tackle. Starting with proving and characterizing G-protein coupling, Ines spends several years studying the activation mechanism of adhesion GPCRs. In collaboration with great fellow adhesion GPCR scientists around the globe she established a tethered agonist -extracellular matrix- mechano-activation- activation scenario that forms the basis for her current projects that focus on the structural and physiological implications of these findings. Together with Simone Prömel, Ines is leading a COST Network on adhesion GPCRs: CA18240 Adher'nRise.

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