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Summer Intern Ecaterina Radzichevici contributes to publication about the structural maintenance of chromosome

IFE,

Since 2016, the annual Summer Internship Program in Epigenetics, Stem Cells, and Artificial Intelligence gives international students the opportunity to work alongside world-leading scientists on original research. Under the supervision of Kurt Schmoller and Francesco Padovani, the summer intern Ecaterina Radzichevici performed experiments and analyses that are now part of the publication Freitag et al., 2022, Biophysics Journal.

chromosomes 3d illustration
chromosomes 3d illustration

Ecaterina Radzichevici was doing her undergraduate studies in Genetics, when she joined the Schmoller Lab at the Institute of Functional Epigenetics of Helmholtz Munich for the Summer Internship in July 2022. For her internship, she was phenotyping cohesin budding yeast mutants using confocal imaging under the supervision of the postdoc Francesco Padovani.

During her time at Helmholtz Munich, she had the chance to contribute to the study of the structural composition and mechanical properties of proteins responsible for structural maintenance of chromosomes. The group of researchers around Marvin Freitag, first-author of the study, from the Stigler Lab at the Gene Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich used optical tweezers unfolding experiments to describe the ring-like architecture formed by elongated coiled-coils. Their findings are published in the Biophysics Journal.

Further information: 

Freitag et al., (2022), Single-molecule experiments reveal the elbow as an essential folding guide in SMC coiled-coil arms. Biophysics Journal.