Oliver Thon

LLOMe has long been used to study lysosomal damage, yet how it works has remained a mystery.
Using cryo-electron tomography, we show it forms amyloid structures inside lysosomes that mechanically rupture membranes – revealing a new paradigm for lysosomal failure.

🔗 doi.org/10.64898/202...

#CryoET

Take advantage of this fantastic opportunity to become part of the SCALE community! Several professorships and group leader positions are available at Goethe University and FIAS. We are looking for professors in the fields of molecular microbiology, cellular biochemistry, and molecular biochemistry.

Evolutionary analysis reveals the origin of sodium coupling in glutamate transporters - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Reddy et al. used ancestral protein reconstruction, cryo-electron microscopy and functional assays to elucidate how a secondary active transporter evolved to harness the energy of sodium gradients to ...

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Happy (but mostly relieved) to share my dream project with @boudkerlab.bsky.social, now published in @natsmb.nature.com! We used evolution, protein engineering & cryoEM to uncover how ion coupling in glutamate transporters works, and how it evolved.🧵
Free article: go.nature.com/4oRUC1q

Last week, we had the pleasure of welcoming Prof. Syma Khalid. PhD representatives of the IRTG board organised a week of talks & events. Syma shared her expertise in MD simulation, science communication & insights into her own research career. Thank you for such inspiring days! @sykhalid.bsky.social

🎉We’re celebrating the #SCALE-it-Best-PhD-Awards-2025, honoring exceptional researchers! 🎓 This year, three remarkable dissertations were recognized, selected from a highly competitive and multidisciplinary pool of candidates. 🧵

🎉 We’re absolutely thrilled: SCALE has been selected as a DFG Excellence Cluster!
A huge thank you to our incredible team—this would not have been possible without your dedication and talent. 🙌 @dfg.de
#ClustersOfExcellence #SCALEcluster 🧵

Single-molecule visualization of ATP-induced dynamics of the subunit composition of an ECF transporter complex under turnover conditions Nature Communications - The association and dissociation dynamics of the ECF transporter complex for vitamin B12 are visualized by single-molecule FRET, highlighting the original transport...

Solène’s 4.5 years of postdoctoral work in our lab (she started just before the corona pandemic) has now been published. A heroic effort that revealed -at the single molecule level- that ATP drives the dissociation of an ECF transporter complex under turnover conditions. See rdcu.be/elTKc

A short intrinsically disordered region at KtrB’s N-terminus facilitates allosteric regulation of K+ channel KtrAB Nature Communications - KtrAB is a major potassium uptake system that has been linked to the pathogenesis of many infectious bacteria. Here the authors show that KtrB from Vibrio alginolyticus...

This took us a while and I am all the happier it is finally out! I thought that simply adding ATP to purified potassium channel KtrAB should be sufficient to stabilize its active state. I was so wrong...
Read the full story on how an IDR facilitates channel opening upon membrane interaction.

A short intrinsically disordered region at KtrB’s N-terminus facilitates allosteric regulation of K+ channel KtrAB Nature Communications - KtrAB is a major potassium uptake system that has been linked to the pathogenesis of many infectious bacteria. Here the authors show that KtrB from Vibrio alginolyticus...

Finally, it's out in Nat Commun! Excellent collaboration with my colleagues and friends in Frankfurt, especially @ihaenelt.bsky.social and Janet Vonck.
This work demonstrates the role of the intrinsically disordered N-terminus of KtrAB in channel opening.

Full story here: rdcu.be/elDYO

Ball-and-chain inactivation of a human large conductance calcium-activated potassium channel pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39971906/ #cryoEM

In a great collaboration with @hummerlab.bsky.social and the Kräusslich lab: HIV capsid doesn't break at the NPC; instead, it cracks open the NPC itself! Details in Cell: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... @mpibp.bsky.social @uniheidelberg.bsky.social A thread below:

Take a look at our paper from last week where we probed the Molecular Architecture of Synaptic Vesicles by cryo-ET and integrative structural analysis

We found that V-ATPases interact with synaptophysin and describe some other molecules of this exciting organelle
🧠🔬❄️

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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