STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION OF RESPIRATORY SUPERCOMPLEXES

Prof. Leonid Sazanov, FRS
Institute of Science and Technology Austria

October 7th 2021 4:30 PM
Aula Magna – “Vallisneri” Building, Via Ugo Bassi 58b, Padova

Born in Belarus, Leonid Sazanov got his PhD at the State University in Moscow in 1990, worked on biophysical issues for some time in Russia, and eventually moved to UK, first at the University of Birmingham, then at the Imperial College London, and eventually, as Group Leader of Bacterial Complex I, at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit (former Dunn Nutrition Institute) in Cambridge, UK. Since 2015 he is Professor and Group Leader at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria, EU.

He was the first to report the structure of the most complex enzyme in nature, Complex I, in Thermus thermophilus, a heat resistant bacterium. Later, he resolved by the new cryo-EM technology the atomic structure of ovine Complex I, published in Science just a few weeks after the Nature report by Judy Hirst’s on the bovine Complex I structure. He is now interested in the formation of the proton-motive force, structure and function of supercomplexes, organization and function of the OXPHOS components, structural alterations of the respiratory chain in human disease. An EMBO member, in 2019 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.