Our new article is featured on the Faculty of Science website!

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From the atom to NK cell: the story of an unexpected protein structure is the name of an article featured on the front page of the Faculty of Science describing our path to a new publication in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

The article describes the journey from the very beginning, tells about the obstacles surpassed and the hard work of the people involved, and drags you into exciting research. Research that has resulted in a publication named Structure of the human NK cell NKR-P1:LLT1 receptor:ligand complex reveals clustering in the immune synapse.

“The result was quite unexpected and interesting. One wonders at that moment whether this is just an artifact of the crystal or whether such a structure really exists on the cell surface.”

RNDr. Ondřej Vaněk, Ph.D.

In this study, the research team led by Dr. Ondřej Vaněk from the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Science, Charles University, and his colleagues from the Institute of Biotechnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the center BIOCEV have discovered the structure of a protein complex involved in recognizing cancerous cells and further studied the fashion in which these proteins interact.

https://www.natur.cuni.cz/eng/aktuality/from-the-atom-to-nk-cell-the-story-of-an-unexpected-protein-structure?set_language=en
The laboratory leader, RNDr. Ondřej Vaněk, Ph.D.

The new publication is success possible only thanks to the efficient collaboration with several other research teams:
– Tereza Skálová, Jan Stránský, Tomáš Kovaľ, Jarmila Dušková, Jindřich Hašek & Jan Dohnálek (Institute of Biotechnology, The Czech Academy of Sciences, BIOCEV Centre, Vestec, Czech Republic)
– Valéria Grobárová (Department of Cell Biology, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic)
– Yuguang Zhao & Karl Harlos (Division of Structural Biology, Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom)

Thank you all!