Dr Juan Palacios-Ortega is a Research Associate in the Department of Chemistry, King’s College London.

Juan received his B.Sc. (Biochemistry) from Complutense University in Madrid. He continued there to get his M.Sc., and then got a double-degree Ph.D. from both Complutense University and Åbo Akademi University (Turku, Finland), from where he moved to King’s to work in the group of Prof Paula Booth.

Now, his research focuses on the mechanisms of membrane protein folding, and how the lipids in their environment affect this process and the structure and functionality of these fundamental proteins.

Integral membrane proteins represent about 30% of all the proteins in a cell, being responsible for essential processes such as transport and signal transduction across membranes. Despite their obvious relevance, membrane proteins have been understudied for a long time since the environment in which they reside has challenged their purification and subsequent study.

New methods, such as cell-free expression, now provide means to study the co-translational insertion and folding of these proteins without the need to purify them. With these techniques, active, correctly folded proteins can not only be obtained, but also monitored as they acquire their functional conformation, helping gain insight into a fundamental biological question, while also providing essential information that can be used for the design of new membrane proteins and drugs against them.

Research Interests

• Membrane protein insertion and folding
• Co-translational folding of membrane proteins
• Role of lipids on co-translational folding

His current research makes use of an interdisciplinary approach using spectroscopy-based time-resolved techniques and molecular dynamics simulations to delve into these processes at the molecular scale.

More Information

• Google Scholar
• PURE
• Orcid
• ResearchGate
• Web of Science