We invite you to a lecture by Professor Johan Åqvist, a renowned Swedish biochemist, a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a former member of the Nobel Prize Chemistry Committee. The lecture, titled "How Enzymes Adapt to Cold?", will take place on November 15, 2024, at 3:00 PM at the Life Sciences Center of Vilnius University (Saulėtekio Ave. 7, Vilnius) in auditoriums R401 and R402.
The lecture will discuss enzymes from ectothermic species that have adapted to cold environments and are able to maintain a surprisingly high reaction rate at low temperatures, where regular enzymes lose most of their activity. These cold-adapted enzymes possess several distinctive and universal features that reflect their evolutionary optimization. The lecture will explore the structural and energetic principles of cold adaptation and demonstrate how computer-generated atomic simulations can be used to determine the temperature dependence of enzyme reaction rates, revealing new insights into the evolution of enzymes in species adapted to different cold conditions.
Professor Johan Åqvist earned his PhD in computational structural biology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. From 1987 to 1989, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Chemistry Department of the University of Southern California. Since 1990, he has been a professor of structural biology, and since 2000, a professor of chemistry at Uppsala University. In 2009, he became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2024, he was awarded a Wallenberg program fellowship.