16 April 2025 – Algirdas Toleikis became fascinated by molecular motors during his postdoctoral work at Warwick University, and thanks to an EMBO Installation Grant now studies helicases in his own laboratory in Vilnius.
“I remember when I saw for the first time this purified molecule, which is just a protein, just one molecule, and you put it on a glass slide and you see that it actually moves! It knows its job and it does its thing although it’s a single molecule with no brain, nothing,” he says.
“I like imagining molecular motors as cars in a busy city, and to navigate the city you need to be quite intelligent. You need to know how to drive the car, you need to know what you’re doing on the road. By the same comparison when I think about molecular motors, that just blows my mind.”
Toleikis’ journey from postdoc to Group Leader included more than a year working as a computer programmer while applying for funding but his heart remained in research.
“Sometimes people want a less risky and permanent job without the hassles of the academic arena. But, oh God, it’s boring! I wanted to go back to this risky and adventurous world,” he says. His EMBO Installation Grant made the transition back to academia and has been “absolutely amazing”.
“The money is very flexible, which is completely opposite to the national grants in Lithuania,” Toleikis says, adding that his grant was helping change attitudes.
“Local administrators might say ‘you cannot do this or that’. Then I come back with my EMBO grant agreement and say ‘this is clearly written, I can do this’. So you keep pushing and suddenly it becomes possible,” he says. “These people are also learning to make things easier, more flexible and more efficient.”
Toleikis attended the EMBO Solutions lab leadership course and says the annual Installation Grantees’ meeting is an excellent learning and networking opportunity. He says he always intended to return to Lithuania, and his advice to current students is to also go abroad to explore different opportunities. “Learn something new, then bring it back home,” he says.
