Dr. Maria Birkou is a postdoctoral Researcher at Department of Pharmacy, University of Patras. She conducted her Master thesis at the Department of Biology, University of Patras. During her master thesis she has been involved at research activities about microbial biotechnology. Specifically, her interests were single cell oil and microbial lipids biosynthesis. In 2012 she started her PhD thesis under the supervision of Professor Georgios A. Spyroulias, at Department of Pharmacy, University of Patras. Her thesis subject was “Study of the structure-function relationship of the E3 ubiquitin ligase Arkadia”. During her thesis she focused on the study of structure and function of metalloproteins, protein-protein interactions and specificity of protein-protein/substrate assembly. Moreover, she established biological assays related to her project as ubiquitination assays and western blot. In 2016 (10-11/2016) she became familiar with eukaryotic cells culture and related biological assays during her visit at Professor’s Vasso Episkopou group at Imperial College, London, UK. In addition to her thesis, she got involved in other projects of the laboratory as viral polypeptides study and she was responsible for the use and maintenance of instruments as the Circular Dichroism Spectrometer. In the beginning of 2019, she started to work as postdoctoral researcher and at the end of 2019 she joined The National Research Infrastructures on Integrated Structural Biology, Drug Screening Efforts and Drug target functional characterization-INSPIRED (MIS 5002550) program. Her job description was organization and scientific support of the participants of the program (Manager). From February 2020 to March 2020 she was a visiting Researcher at the Department of Medicine, Imperial College, UK.

Most Important Publications:

1. ‘’Improving fatty acid composition of lipids Synthesized by Brachionus plicatilis in large scale experiments.’’, M. Birkou, D. Bokas, G. Aggelis. Journal of the American Oil Chemists Society, (2012) 89(11), 2047-2055.
2. ‘’A residue-specific insight into the Arkadia E3 ubiquitin ligase activity and conformational plasticity.’’, M. Birkou, C. T. Chasapis, K. D. Marousis, A. K. Loutsidou, D. Bentrop, M. Lelli, T. Herrmann, M Carthy J., Episkopou V., Spyroulias GA., Journal of Molecular Biology, (2017) 429(15), 2373-2386.
3. ‘’Lead identification through synergistic action of biomolecular NMR and In silico Methodologies’’, K. D. Marousis, A. C. Tsika, M. Birkou, M.-T. Matsoukas, G. A. Spyroulias, Rational Drug Design, (2018), 299-316.
4. ‘’Conformational plasticity of the VEEV macro domain is important for binding of ADP-ribose’’, G. I. Makrynitsa, D. Ntonti, K. D. Marousis, M. Birkou, M.-T. Matsoukas, S. Asamj, D. Bentrop, N. Papageorgiou, B. Canard, B. Coutard, G. A. Spyroulias, Journal of Structural Biology, (2019) 206(1), 119-127
5. ‘’1H, 13C, 15N backbone and side chain assignment of the native form of UbcH7 (UBE2L3) through solution NMR spectroscopy.’’, K. D. Marousis, M. Birkou, A. Asimakopoulou, G. A. Spyroulias, Biomolecular NMR Assignment, (2020) 14(1), 73-78.

Current funding: ‘’Studying the mechanism of action of E3 ubiquitin ligase Arkadia in the ubiquitination system)” State Scholarships Foundation (IKY), Postdoctoral Researchers Grant

Email: mbirkou@upatras.gr