Cermakova lab

Our mission and vision

The ability to visualize the atomic structures of proteins and protein complexes has made remarkable contributions towards our understanding of the gene expression machinery. Recent technical advances now routinely enable structural insights about multi-subunit protein assemblies reaching into the megadalton scale.

Despite the unprecedented power to resolve such structures, modern techniques are still largely unable to resolve flexible, intrinsically disordered, or dynamic regions. As a result, revealing the structural basis underlying the biology of disordered protein remains the dominant challenge in structural biology for the coming decades.

Despite lacking stable structure, intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are especially enriched in proteins that regulate chromatin and transcription. Hence, unstructured protein represents a uniquely important and unaddressed frontier for structural, biochemical, and cellular biology underlying gene regulation.

Research interests

• Interactions between folded domains and IDRs
• Structural biology of SLiM binding scaffolds
• Spatial organization of the transcription machinery
• High-throughput discovery