Christelle Hureau

Fellowship 2015

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Christelle Hureau did her PhD in Orsay (France) in the Inorganic Chemistry Lab, on coordination chemistry of Mn-based structural models of the water oxidizing centre of the Photosystem II and graduated in 2003. Then, she made three post-docs at the frontier between chemistry, biochemistry and advanced spectroscopy and electrochemistry. In 2007, she joined the Coordination Chemistry Lab in Toulouse (France) as a tenured CNRS researcher in the Biologicial Chemistry Group headed by Prof. P. Faller. She is a recipient of the 2012 CNRS Bronze medal and of the 2013 award from the Coordination Chemistry Division of the French Chemical Society. She was awarded by the French foundation on Alzheimer’s disease in 2013 to lead a project on the molecular recognition of amyloid-β oligomers, a key element of the amyloid cascade process linked to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In 2015, she received an ERC starting Grant to study the role of zinc in the aetiology of AD and in therapeutic strategies based on chelation. She is the authors of more than 70 publications and is strongly involved in scientific dissemination. She will be (co)chair of the next Journées de Chimie de Coordination, FrenchBIC meetings and International Symposium on Applied Bio-Inorganic Chemistry. She has recently taken the leadership of the research group in Toulouse.

Peptides as biological shuttles for copper ions

USIAS Fellows : Peter Faller et Christelle Hureau
Post-doc: Paulina Gonzalez

Biological membranes play an absolute key role in life, as they form the border between inside and outside and hence control what enters and what leaves a cell. Cells need a tight control of the concentration of all chemicals (like proteins, metabolites, ions etc.). Loss of controls about the concentration of the entities can lead to disease and ultimately to death.

Copper is an essential metal ion and is important as a catalytic center is several processes including very fundamental ones like energy production. That's why loss of control over Cu is very dangerous and is well documented by two genetic diseases, called Wilson's and Menkes' diseases, one leading to an accumulation of Cu and the other one to a lack of Cu. Both diseases are lethal at young ages if not treated. Also in several neurodegenerative diseases, a Cu dyshomeostasis seems to be involved. In Alzheimer's disease, small molecules having a so called Cu-ionophore activity (able to transport Cu through membranes) showed promising results in therapeutic approaches.

The project consists of designing and investigating peptidic platforms to bind, transfer and deliver copper ions intra-cellularly. pH or redox changes are exploited as stimuli for intracellular Cu release. Peptides have been chosen for their high modularity and their multi-functional ability. The proposed approach is based on the coupling of a cell penetrating moiety and a copper binding sequence. The project aims to provide fundamental insights about this new type of copper transport, to obtain a new tool to probe the importance of copper homeostasis in biological processes and might be of interest for therapeutic applications.