Medical University of Lublin

ARMs Lab - Synthetic Biology and Cell Signalling

Research Group members

Principal Investigator

Adolfo Rivero-Müller

 

Members of the research group

Jakub Czapiński; Soumya Menon; Lidia Borkiewicz; Karolina Czapla

 

PhD students

Thu Ha Ngo; Volodymyr Shynkivskyi; Krystian Łopucki (UMCS)

 

Alumni

Ashutosh Trehan (defended PhD in September 2016) currently a scientist fellow at Astra Zeneca, Cambridge, UK.

Valeriy Paramonov (defended PhD in August 2021) currently a postdoc at Karolinska Institute, Sweden.

Joanna Kałafut (defended PhD in September 2023)

Kamila Szymanska (defended PhD in September 2023)

Alicja Przybyszewska-Podstawka (defended PhD in October 2023)

 

Alicja PrzybyszewskaJoanna KałafutKarolina Czapla

Krystian Łopucki

Description of research

Research interests in brief

Our ultimate goal is to understand how living organisms function. With this aim we work on cell function as well as cell control using many different cutting-edge molecular biology techniques.

 

Every cell in the body of a multicellular organism has all the information to create a clone of the same organism. They have all the instructions such as growing, migrating and dividing, yet, instead cells organise and differentiate into all the different tissues in our bodies. This means that cells follow a programme where some of their activities are repressed while others are activated. How cells communicate with each other and make decision on what each cells will become is something we are just starting to understand. Moreover, cells “remember” such instructions and can pass the information to the next generation of cells when they divide.

 

Our group’s research focus is the understanding of how cells make decisions at the molecular level, and more importantly how we can manipulate the key players: proteins and RNA, in a way that we can control the activity and fate of cells. In other words, we not only want to understand the molecular mechanisms but we would like to be able to programme cells and in some cases change their fate, for example stopping cancer cells from migrating.

 

Cells are extremely complex and the networks of interactions within cells is overwhelming. Thus, we use cutting-edge molecular biology techniques to be able to manipulate cells at all levels (DNA, RNA, Protein) and modern synthetic biology tools such as proteins that get activated or inactivated by light, RNA that acts as scaffold for protein complexes, or riboprotein complexes that are able to delete, replace or repair genes in cells.

 

As working with biological systems has many challenges, we also work in the development or improvement of molecular tools in order to study complex phenomena.

 

Researchgate

Job openings

Dyscypline

Medical Sciences

Keywords

Synthetic Biology, Cell-Cell Interactions, Cell Signalling, Receptor, Ligand, Pathway, Cell Communication, Optogenetics, Translation, GPCR, Notch, Logic Gate, Molecular Tools, Gene Editing

Grants supporting our research

OPUS 9:  2015/17/B/NZ1/01777

Miniatura: 2017/01/X/NZ1/00107 (Michał Kiełbus)

OPUS 13: 2017/25/B/NZ4/02364

Preludium: 2018/29/N/NZ5/02670 (Kamila Szymanska)

Miniatura 2019/03/X/NZ4/01101 (Karolina Dudziak)

OPUS+LAP 2020:  UMO-2020/39/I/ST5/03560

Preludium: 2021/41/N/NZ5/01938 (Joanna Kałafut)

OPUS 23: 2022/45/B/NZ3/02353   (in consortium with UMCS)

Miniatura: 2023/07/X/NZ3/01698 (Jakub Czapinski)

Akademickie Partnerstwa Międzynarodowe (International Academic Partnership) POLFINGERS

Prof. Walczak programme PPN/WAL/2020/1/00008 (Karolina Dudziak)

Translational control in Cancer European Network (TRANSLACORE) by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) CA21154.

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

Calendar

March 2025


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