Gurevich Lab

Denis Hüwel is a DAAD RISE worldwide summer scholar from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.  Denis joined my lab in July and will be returning to Germany October 13, 2013.

Junior, class of 2014.
Denis is originally from Munich, Germany. He was sophomere in chemical engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) before he changed his major to pharmaceutical sciences at the Ludwig-Maximillians-University of Munich (LMU).

Research Description

Denis works under direct supervision of Dr. Luis Gimenez, a post-doctoral fellow, and Qiuyan Chen, an experienced graduate student. With Luis Denis generated five new arrestin-3 mutants that are expected to have increased receptor specificity. He is currently testing their binding to different G protein-coupled receptors using BRET between luciferase-tagged receptors and Venus-tagged arrestins in intact cells. This method allowed us to identify in an earlier series of ten mutants forms of arrestin-3 with remarkably enhanced selectivity to particular receptors (whereas wild type arrestin-3 is very promiscuous). With Qiuyan Denis made two arrestin-2/3 chimeras and two mutants of arrestin-3 to test the mechanisms of their self-association. Qiuyan has preliminary data suggesting that arrestin-2 forms large oligomers having the shape of “infinite” (very long) chains, whereas arrestin-3 only forms dimers and stops there. The chimeras and mutants Denis made and will express in E. coli and purify will help us test these hypotheses.

Publications

coming soon