• extracellular vesicles
• interactomics
• Neurotrophins receptor
• p75NTR
• single particle tracking
• TrkA

My master thesis work is part of a research project concerning the study of subcellular localization and dynamics of neurotrophin membrane receptors. To this purpose, my group has developed in the last years a method for site-directed and stoichiometry-controlled enzymatic labeling of neurotrophins and their receptors working in vitro on purified neurotrophins, as well as on living cells where it achieves selective labeling of surface-exposed neurotrophin receptors.
During my thesis work, I managed to produce and purify an enzyme for neurotrophin receptor labeling and used this tool to characterize the time-dependent variation of cell surface density of WT, K544N and R649W TrkA receptors in response to NGF. In parallel, TAP-tagged constructs of TrkA variants will allow the recovery of protein extracts highly enriched in TrkA and relative interactors to be analyzed by mass spectrometry. Finally, I produced extracellular vesicles containing p75NTR, which are currently being analyzed by our collaborators.