Young researcher Anja Pucer has been involved in the project with her doctoral thesis program, entering the 2nd year of the program Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies, at the Jozef Stefan International Postgraduate School. She constructed several vectors harboring genes of selected human sPLA2s and some other enzymes, aimed to transfect them into different mammalian cells. On the cellular models, she will study the effects of overexpression of each gene on proliferation and in vitro invasiveness. Anja also prepared a breast cancer cell line MDA-MB-231 that stably overexpressed human sPLA2-X.
D.09 Tutoring for postgraduate students
In 2009, we started withing the scope of a BSc thesis (a female student from the Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, University of Ljubljana) with a production of recombinant human secretory phospholipase A2 of group IIA (sPLA2-IIA) in a bacterial expression system. An expression plasmid was constructed to produce recombinant sPLA2-IIA in E. coli in the form of a shorter N-terminal fusion protein. In this year, we are planning to obtain enzymatically active human sPLA2-IIA after in vitro refolding and enzymatic activation of the inactive fusion enzyme.
D.10 Educational activities