Maria Politi is a PhD student at the Department of Pharmacy holding a Master Degree in “Drug Discovery and Development” on the specialization “Pharmaceutical chemistry–drug design”, from the University of Patras. She graduated from University of Patras, School of Science, Department of Biology in 2016 and she joined the Lab of Biomolecular NMR, at the University of Patras, Department of Pharmacy in 2016, where she obtained her MSc in Structural Biology under the supervision of G. A. Spyroulias. During her Master thesis she characterized a number of viral recombinant proteins, using a variety of experimental protocols for structural studies via NMR spectroscopy. She gained experience in molecular biology techniques (design of recombinant plasmid vectors, Gene cloning, Site Direct Mutagenesis etc.), protein expression (E. coli) and protein purification (FPLC, Size Exclusion Chromatography, Affinity Chromatography, Ion Exchange etc.). In addition, she has experience in the field of Isotopic protein labeling (¹⁵N, ¹³C, ²H) in E. coli for NMR structural studies and protein–ligand, protein–protein interactions via NMR spectroscopy, Circular Dichroism, and ITC. Moreover, she started her PhD thesis at the same laboratory, and she is working on viral proteins and on the investigation of the structure-function relationship of Arkadia E3 Ubiquitin ligase.

Her major research interests cover all aspects of expression, isolation, purification, and physicochemical characterization of recombinant proteins.

Current Funding: Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the HFRI PhD Fellowship grant, (Fellowship Number: 81008).

Email: m.politi@upnet.gr