Federico Musso works at the Institut de Biologie Structurale.

His project: Arc-RQC – Characterization of the archaeal ribosome quality control system

How cold is too cold for life to thrive? And how hot is too hot, especially when you know that a cup of coffee can already burn your tongue? Here at IBS we try to answer this second question, mainly by trying to understand how some hardcore microorganisms manage to survive pretty well at crushing water pressures and temperatures around 90 °C!

Hello everyone! My name is Federico Musso and I am a new PhD student at IBS, where I am learning and practising structural biochemistry! I work with the Extremophiles and Large Molecular Assemblies (ELMA) group, where we study archaean adaptation to high temperatures at the molecular level. Archaea are, in fact, exactly the hardcore guys that I mentioned above. They constitute a completely separated and largely unknown domain of life, and have probably had a completely different evolutionary history that diverged from ours (and from any other form of life!!) billions of years ago. During these aeons, some archaea ended up occupying some of the most extreme habitats in the world, including the ice caps of Antarctica and the edges of active volcanoes thousands of metres below the sea. In my thesis, I will use a number of cutting-edge techniques to study what makes archaean proteins so resistant to high temperatures and what they look like at atomic resolution. For the expert audience, I will essentially characterise a number of Proteasome activators (PA) and perform Cryo Electron Microscopy to solve their structures. I have a background in biotechnology and biochemistry, so the structural biology side will be the most important learning journey during these years!

Aside from science, I came to Grenoble also to practise some of my favourite activities, which include climbing, alpine skiing, mountaineering and playing music!

Feel free to contact me for any further insight about my project!

Cheers,
Fede