Prof. Jorge Alegre-Cebollada is a BSc in Chemistry who moved to get a MSc and a PhD in Biochemistry at the Complutense University studying the physicochemical properties of membrane pore-forming proteins. He then worked in the laboratory of Prof. Julio M. Fernández (Columbia University, New York), in which he worked on single-molecule biophysics and chemistry, including the study of the redox properties and function of sulfhydryl groups in proteins. In 2014, he established his own research group at CNIC (Molecular Mechanics of the Cardiovascular System) to take the leap and study how the crosstalk between biochemistry and mechanical forces influence physiology and disease.
Dr. Alegre-Cebollada has produced milestone contributions to understand how redox chemical modifications targeting the thiol group of cysteines regulate the performance of proteins with mechanical functions, such as titin. His group has recently developed methodologies to improve AFM-based characterization of mechanical properties of proteins (manuscript uploaded in bioRxiv). They are also building on information at the nanoscale to engineer new biomaterials with unique mechanical properties. Many of his contributions have been published in leading scientific journals such as Cell, Nature Chemistry, Nature Communications, Nature Struct Mol Biol, JBC, JACS, PNAS, J Mol Biol and Byophys J.
