ERC Starting Grant · 2025
Phenotyping of protein mechanics Libraries to unravel the design principles of catch bonds
Mechanical forces that steer protein interactions and folding play pivotal roles in biology. They shape cellular fate, and are critical factors in both pathogen adhesion and immune response. Catch bonds, atypical interfaces that increase their bound lifetime under mechanical force, play a central role in these processes. At present, we have no model nor datasets large enough to predict if an interaction is a catch bond from its structure without doing experiments, let alone design new catch bonds. Single molecule force spectroscopy (SMFS) methods investigate the mechanics of proteins involved in these processes. These techniques typically have high force resolution, but extremely low…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.