Roksana Nikoopour wins prize at European Muscle Conference

Roksana Nikoopour, a PhD a student in the Gautel group in the Randall Centre for Cell & Molecular Biophysics, School of Basic & Medical Biosciences, won the prize for best oral presentation for her talk at the European Muscle Conference in Budapest last month.

Roksana (left) with her award.

Her talk ‘Structural and biophysical characterisation of titin missense variants in genetic myopathies/cardiomyopathies’ discusses genetic conditions affecting skeletal and cardiac muscle called Myopathies. Myopathies are often caused by mutations in genes, such as TTN which encodes the giant protein titin. Due to its size, TTN gene variants are also found in unaffected individuals (as shown by the 1000 Genomes Project) and it is difficult to assess their impact. In this project, biophysical techniques such as X-ray crystallography, differential scanning fluorimetry (DSF) and 1D Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) were applied to determine the structure of single and multiple titin A-band domains, in order to assess the impact of suspected and proven pathogenic variants on their stability and structure. 

Roksana studied a BSc Chemistry with Biochemistry at Queen Mary University of London and then MRes in Molecular Biophysics here at King’s in the Randall Centre for Cell & Molecular Biophysics. Before this, she taught English in a secondary school in Ceuta, Spain. Roksana wrote about a day in the life os a second year student in the School of Basic & Medical Biosciences Student blog here.