Gabriella (Gabi) Heller is the Rosalind Franklin Research Fellow at Newnham College. Her research focuses on intrinsically disordered proteins, biomolecules lacking a single, rigid three-dimensional structure that instead exist as a dynamic equilibrium of conformationally distinct states. These proteins are highly prevalent in diseases such as dementia and cancer, yet are often considered therapeutically 'untargetable' as they are unamenable to traditional drug discovery techniques. Gabriella aims to understand whether and how intrinsically disordered proteins can be targeted by small molecule therapeutics using a combination of computational and experimental techniques.
Publications
Thermodynamic and kinetic design principles for amyloid-aggregation inhibitors.
– Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
(2020)
117,
24251
(DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2006684117)
Rational design of a conformation-specific antibody for the quantification of A beta oligomers
– Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(2020)
117,
13509
(DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1919464117)
Trodusquemine enhances A beta(42) aggregation but suppresses its toxicity by displacing oligomers from cell membranes
– Nat Commun
(2019)
10,
225
(DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07699-5)
Small molecule sequestration of amyloid-β as a drug discovery strategy for Alzheimer’s disease
(2019)
(DOI: 10.1101/729392)
Promoting transparency and reproducibility in enhanced molecular simulations
– Nature Methods
(2019)
16,
670
(DOI: 10.1038/s41592-019-0506-8)
Determination of Structural Ensembles of Proteins: Restraining vs Reweighting
– Journal of chemical theory and computation
(2018)
14,
6632
(DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.8b00738)
Structural Ensemble Modulation upon Small-Molecule Binding to Disordered Proteins.
– Journal of molecular biology
(2018)
430,
2288
(DOI: 10.1016/j.jmb.2018.03.015)
Multistep Inhibition of α-Synuclein Aggregation and Toxicity in Vitro and in Vivo by Trodusquemine
– ACS Chem Biol
(2018)
13,
2308
(DOI: 10.1021/acschembio.8b00466)
Methods of probing the interactions between small molecules and disordered proteins
– Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS
(2017)
74,
3225
(DOI: 10.1007/s00018-017-2563-4)
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