Investigation of interaction of membrane-lytic molecules with lipid monolayer
- Interests: Experimental biophysics
- Supervisors: Jian Lu
- Host institution: University of Manchester, UK
Short Bio
Being originally from Republic of Moldova, I came in Romania in 2005 in order do be a high school student and I graduated in 2009 from the „AL.I.Cuza” theoretical high-school in Iasi. In 2009 I started the Undergraduate studies at the at the Faculty of Physics, „AL.I.Cuza” University of Iasi at the Medical Physics programme. In 2012 I graduated and was enrolled in the Master studies, the same University, at the Biophysics and Medical Physics programme. I graduated in the summer of 2014. During the Bachelor’s studies I had the opportunity to go to a 3 months research stage with Erasmus program at the University of Angers, France where I conducted a project in the field of thin solid films. During the most part of the Master studies I worked as a research assistant in a national project where my main activity was the AFM single-molecule experiments. Also, in the first year of my MSc I went to Brno, Czech Republic, to participate at a summer school, called “SPM Microscopy”. I have presented the results of my research with 7 communications at national and international conferences (from these I had 1 oral presentation), from which two posters were awarded with the best poster prizes.
2014-present | Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Early Stage Researcher. University of Manchester, UK |
Methods and techniques
- Neutron reflection (NR) and Small angle neutron scattering (SANS)
- Spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE)
- Dual polarization interferometry (DPI)
- Langmuir trough
SNAL Project
- ESR9-M: Investigation of interaction of membrane-lytic molecules with lipid monolayer
Supported bilayers and vesicles Objectives The intention of this project is to obtain experimental information and feedback for system improvement of nano-objects interacting with model membranes (supported bilayers and vesicles). to apply a combination of techniques including neutron reflectivity, SANS (Manchester, Unilever), AFM, TEM (Strasbourg, Manchester) to characterise supported lipid bilayers and model vesicles; to investigate how different nano-objects ...
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Publications
- Influence of Acyl Chain Saturation on the Membrane-Binding Activity of a Short Antimicrobial Peptide
ACS Omega, 2(11) 7482–7492 (2017) Daniela Ciumac, Richard A. Campbell, Luke A. Clifton, Hai Xu∥ , Giovanna Fragneto, and Jian R. ...
- Implications of lipid monolayer charge characteristics on their selective interactions with a short antimicrobial peptide
Colloids and Surfaces B, 150, 308–316 (2017). Daniela Ciumac, Richard A. Campbell, Hai Xu, Luke A. Clifton, Arwel V. Hughes, John ...