Pastore group ::
Our current interests cover two independent lines of research which belong to fundamental areas of molecular biology:
- molecular mechanism of genetic disorders such as the family of diseases characterised by trinucleotide expansion
- muscle assembly and regulation: structure/ function studies of titin
Major research projects in progress include FMR1 - the protein responsible for the Fragile X syndrome, frataxin - directly involved in Friedreich ataxia, and proteins containing a poly-glutamine expansion - such as ataxin 1 and huntingtin.
We have also undertaken a long-term project aimed at the characterisation of titin, a giant muscle protein which is directly implicated in muscle assembly and elasticity.
Our approach is to dissect the proteins into their structural and functional units. We perform structure determination in solution using primarily NMR as well as other spectroscopic and biochemical techniques. The study of selected modules and their interfaces is then related to the structure and function of the overall protein.