Date and time: Thursday 7th November at 12:00 pm in the Turku Bioscience 5th floor seminar room (B-side).

Tentative title: How to Build an actin network around endocytic sites.

Biography: Leonardo Almeida-Souza is a Brazilian biologist. He obtained his PhD at the Flemish Institute of Biotechnology (VIB) in Belgium studying the cellular and biochemical effects of mutations in small heat shock proteins causing Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. For his postdoc, Dr. Almeida-Souza moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK as an EMBO fellow to study endocytosis. His work revealed that the protein FCHSD2 is a major activator of actin polymerisation during Clathrin-Mediated Endocytosis (Almeida-Souza, Cell 2018). This work used cell biology, biochemistry and structural biology to reveal multiple aspects of the biology of this protein such as the structural details of its recruitment to endocytic sites, its molecular mechanism of actin polymerisation activation and its unique localisation at the base of clathrin coated pits. In 2019, Dr. Almeida-Souza was recruited by the Helsinki Institute of Life Sciences (HiLIFE) as an Assistant professor in Cell Biology. His group aims to understand the biology of the endocytic cytoskeleton from molecules to organisms in health and disease.

Selected recent publications:
Almeida-Souza L, Frank RAW, García-Nafría J, Colussi A, Gunawardana N, Johnson CM, Yu M, Howard G, Andrews B, Vallis Y, McMahon HT (2018). A Flat BAR Protein Promotes Actin Polymerization at the Base of Clathrin-Coated Pits. Cell. 174(2):325-337.e14. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.05.020.

Krols M, Detry S, Asselbergh B, Almeida-Souza L, Kremer A, Lippens S, De Rycke R, De Winter V, Müller FJ, Kurth I, McMahon HT, Savvides SN, Timmerman V, Janssens S (2018). Sensory-Neuropathy-Causing Mutations in ATL3 Cause Aberrant ER. Membrane Tethering. Cell Rep. 23(7):2026-2038. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.04.071.

Kennedy D, Mnich K, Oommen D, Chakravarthy R, Almeida-Souza L, Krols M, Saveljeva S, Doyle K, Gupta S, Timmerman V, Janssens S, Gorman AM, Samali A (2017). HSPB1 facilitates ERK-mediated phosphorylation and degradation of BIM to attenuate endoplasmic reticulum stress-induced apoptosis. Cell Death Dis. 8(8):e3026. doi: 10.1038/cddis.2017.408.

Geuens T, De Winter V, Rajan N, Achsel T, Mateiu L, Almeida-Souza L, Asselbergh B, Bouhy D, Auer-Grumbach M, Bagni C, Timmerman V (2017). Mutant HSPB1 causes loss of translational repression by binding to PCBP1, an RNA binding protein with a possible role in neurodegenerative disease. Acta Neuropathol Commun. 5(1):5. doi: 10.1186/s40478-016-0407-3.

Boucrot E, Ferreira AP, Almeida-Souza L, Debard S, Vallis Y, Howard G, Bertot L, Sauvonnet N, McMahon HT (2015). Endophilin marks and controls a clathrin-independent endocytic pathway. Nature. 2015 Jan 22;517(7535):460-5. doi: