IBEC Seminar: Dr Stefano Angioletti Uberti
Dijous, febrer 20 @ 10:00 am–11:00 am
Multivalent interactions: Old concept, new tricks
Dr Stefano Angioletti Uberti, Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London
Arguably,multivalency has been used since the 1970s as a mechanism to increase the binding strength while using weak ligand-receptor pairs. While this (somewhat naive) view as a general approach to increase binding strength must be taken with a pinch of salt but, it also downplays the importance of multilvalent interactions for selectivity. In fact, multivalent interactions become crucial to obtain binding selectivity in scenarios where targets vs non-target entitites (cells, viruses, …) do not differ by the presence or lack of a specific receptor, but by receptors’ spatial distribution. In this seminar, I will describe some of our most recent research into this topic, focusing on two intriguing cases: the use of multivalent binding to enhance targeting in drug-delivery, and its (potential) role as a general mechanism to regulate how cells “sense” and react to their environment.
