21 January 2025 – “Cryogenic electron microscopy was booming everywhere,” Petr Těšina recalls the year 2016, when he was awarded his PhD degree. It’s when the structural biologist, who pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in the Czech Republic, decided to move to Germany to learn the method and study co-translational quality control. In summer 2023, he returned to his home country to start a junior research group at the Central European Institute of Technology at Masaryk University in Brno. Today, his group consists of four researchers, and recruitment is ongoing.
In his research Těšina investigates the ribosome-associated quality control (RQC) pathway. This fail-safe mechanism degrades nascent proteins during translation. Mutations that inhibit its activity lead to neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative disorders. “We would like to reveal molecular mechanisms of ribosome-associated quality control by our structures,” says Těšina. “We are especially intrigued by the question why such a generally important fail-safe mechanism is specifically important in neurons.” His group uses a combination of experimental and computational approaches, namely biochemistry, cryogenic electron microscopy and GPU-powered data processing, to address the questions.
Těšina explains that the EMBO Installation Grant can help with its flexible funding, which he can spend, for example, on personal costs or instruments, when the need arises. And he sees more benefits: “The EMBO Installation Grant is not so much about the money. For me, there is a huge benefit of the whole EMBO network, and the team members will be able to attend a very valuable course organized by EMBO and conferences.”
