Elegheert Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2019

Molecular Structure and Engineering of Synaptic Organizer Proteins in Health and Disease

Synapses are the specialized cellular junctions that form the basic units of communication between neuronal cells. Given the variety of network-dependent functions that synapses need to support, a fundamental question is how their properties are specified at the molecular level. Membrane-anchored and soluble “synaptic organizer proteins” form adhesive interactions that mediate synapse formation and differentiation. However, a structural and mechanistic understanding of how they recruit and organize the molecular machinery for neurotransmission is largely lacking. Simultaneously, dysfunction of synapses and loss of neurons are hallmarks of neurodegenerative disease that underlie a persistent…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.