News

July 4, 2017. Kasper speaks at the EICC4 conference. Speaking on the role of metal ions in Alzheimer's disease.
 
May 8, 2017. Kasper will speak at the Danish Annual meeting for Neuroscience. Speaking on the ´Molecular causes of Alzheimer's from patient-protein correlations.'
 
March 2017. Review of heme's amazing chemical properties and role in life is out. Heme is the central oxygen manager of life on our planet; without it, it would be hard to imagine oxygen-based life as we know it. Why is heme so special? The review summarizes why.
 
Feb 2017. Benchmarking DFT for gold: First detailed benchmark of DFT's ability to describe diverse chemical bonds to gold
 DFT studies of gold chemistry are common and diverse - but how accurate are they? This paper reports a detailed comparison of commonly used density functionals applied to gold chemistry

Jul 2016. The International Conference on Porphyrins and Phthalocyanins. Kasper speaks on the evolution of heme from quantum mechanics of spin crossover to oxygen storage in diving whales

Apr 2016. Protein stability effects are universal: An application towards myoglobin of diving whales. We report the discovery of generic stability relaxation and a new model that can account for multi-site protein variants.

Feb 2016. The general mess of Aβ (new work published in Alzheimer & Dementia). Widely used biochemical data of β-amyloid used to support the amyloid hypothesis are disturbingly heterogeneous and show no relationship to clinical outcome, as shown in our meta analysis. Toxicity and aggregation propensity measured in standard models do not correlate with clinical data at all. We conclude that these cell and mouse models of Alzheimer's do not reflect the human disease.

Sep 2015. The quest for the structure of β-amyloid (new work published in ChemPhysChem). Commonly used force fields produce major differences in structures of the disordered β-amyloid. We identify the ensembles that best explain experimental NMR and CD data, providing a model of the true β-amyloid ensemble relevant for treating Alzheimer’s disease.

July 2015.  Attending the ICCB conference in Kauai, Hawaii, July 2 to 6. At this meeting, Kasper talks about our results on the mechanisms that control the Fe-O bond in biological processes.

June 2015. Attending the EMBO neurodegeneration meeting in Heidelberg June 14-17. At the EMBO Symposium in Heidelberg, we present our Proteostatic exhaustion mechanism of ALS, that increased proteome maintenance energy is the  cause of ALS, from analysis of ALS-causing SOD1 mutations.

March 2015. Molecular Causes of ALS: Coupling protein energy to real patient data for carriers of SOD1 variants suggest that proteome energy  contributes to disease. In the most systematic analysis of SOD1 variants so far, we find that patient survival correlates strongly with stability, charge, and in particular misfolded protein copies, suggesting a new theory of neurodegeneration caused by proteome exhaustion.

Feb 2015. New mechanism of laccase inhibition: Halides impair critical reorganization energies. Laccases,industrially important copper enzymes, are inhibited by small anions, thought to bind to copper and block reactivity. We identified a new mechanism of this inhibition due to changes in the redox properties, distinct from e.g. channel blocking or conformation change. It explains the experimental stronger inhibition of fluoride vs. chloride.

Nov 2014. New patent WO2014167112 for synthesizing sugars. Together with researchers at DTU Chemical Engineering, we have invented a new mutant trans sialidase with enhanced ability to transfer and build  sugars relevant to functional food ingredients. 

Nov 2014. First relation between real patient data and biochemical properties of genetic variants causing Alzheimer's disease. We have shown how clinical patient data of carriers of genetic variants (age of disease onset) can be correlated directly with chemical properties of the amyloid mutants that the patients carry. Disordered hydrophobic exposure correlate with disease characteristics, the first identified such correlation in Alzheimer's Disease. 

Oct 2014. Søren Brander successfully defends his Ph.D. thesis. Congratulations! Søren's work has resulted in the discovery of several bacterial "laccases"by genome mining of extremophilic organisms. One of the laccases shows improved alkaline and salt tolerance (from B. clausii), and another has the second-highest thermostability ever measured for a laccase. Both serve as important new frameworks for laccase optimization far away in sequence space from known industrial laccases.

Sep 2014.  Arun joins our group as a ph.d. student to work on proteins involved in Alzheimer's disease. We are making amyloid mutants in the lab and pinpoint their disease mechanism by molecular simulations.

Dec 2013.  Kasper joins the Management commitee of the EU-sponsored COST action on spin states in biochemistry and technology." Explicit Control Over Spin-states in Technology and Biochemistry"

Nov 2013.  Welcome to Dr. Manish Tiwari, who is working on understanding the structure-property-phenotype relationships in Alzheimer disease peptides " Can Alzheimer be cured?"  

Jun 2013.  Dr. Pouria Dasmeh succesfully defends his Ph.D. thesis. Congratulations!

Dec 2012.  "Ny dansk teori kan styrke kampen mod Alzheimers". Our research is described Sunday Dec 9 in the Danish newspaper Politiken " Ny dansk teori kan styrke kampen mod Alzheimers!"

Oct 2012. New review in Chemical Reviews on the status of the biochemistry of Alzheimer's Disease: "Bioinorganic Chemistry of Alzheimer's Disease"

Sep 2012.  Kasper speaks as invited speaker at the CECAM workshop in Zaragoza, Sep 18-21. The topic is “spin states in biochemistry and inorganic chemistry”.

Aug 2012.  New review on theoretical inorganic chemistry: "Consistent descriptions of metal–ligand bonds and spin-crossover in inorganic chemistry"

Jan 2012.  RSC Hot article: New light on Zn and Cu metallothionein clusters.  Helen Lund, Editor. It "may have important consequences for our understanding of the interaction between metal ions and metallothionein proteins."

Jun 2011. Kasper speaks as invited speaker at the Quantum Bioinorganic Chemistry (QBIC-3) conference in Chesky Krumlov (Organizer: Lubomir Rulisek).

Jun 2011.  KPK speaks as invited speaker at the Danish Chemical Society's annual national meeting in Odense.

Apr 2011.  We welcome Niels Johan Christensen as new postdoc in the group. Niels will work on computermodels (MD, QM) of laccase enzymes.

Mar 2011.  We welcome Søren Brander as new Ph.D. student in the group. Søren will work on directed laboraoty and rational computerbased evolution of laccase enzymes.

Oct 2010. Kasper received funding of ca. 5 million DKK from the Danish Research Council for Technology and Production to explore the "Rational  Evolution of Superstable Laccases.