Featuring... Kaspar Locher. Winner of the 2008 FEES Letters Young Scientist

摘要

Dr. Kaspar Locher was selected as the winner of the 2008 FEBS Letters Young Scientist Award for his outstanding work and paper on the "Structure of the multidrug ABC transporter Savl866 from Staphylococcus aureus in complex with AMP-PNP". Assistant Professor of Molecular Membrane Biology at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, Kaspar Locher is a dynamic young group leader with a restless mind and a resolute personality.ABC transporters are one of the most diverse families of transport proteins in biology. Somebody called them "Nature's favorite pump". ABC importers can take ATP from the cell and convert it into mechanical force to drive nutrient intake in bacteria, while ABC exporters extrude toxic substances in bacteria, in cancer cells (a major cause of multidrug resistance in chemotherapy), or in epithelial cells of the blood-brain barrier, to protect the brain from toxic insults.Membrane proteins have been the object of my studies ever since my PhD, when I determined the structure of an iron transporterin the outer membrane of Escherichia coli . I am fascinated by the diversity of functions transporters can have, and I am tickled by their resistance to crystallization. I can't resist the challenge, I just have to crack the problem!