Thomas Nystrom

Thomas Nystrom (Sweden) has a long-term interest in studying protein homeostasis and protein damage in single cell organisms including E. coli and S. cerevisiae. His laboratory developed a protocol allowing detection of oxidized proteins in single cells, which lead to the discovery that oxidatively damage proteins are inherited in a non-Mendelian, asymmetrical, fashion in budding yeast such that most damaged proteins are retained in old mother cells. This discovery highlighted that protein quality control entails spatial aspects and provided the impetus to embark on genome-wide methods to find new genes and networks involved in temporal-spatial quality control of proteins as an approach to find potential drug targets that may retard the development of age-related maladies. For his research on this topic he has received the Göran Gustavsson Award in Molecular Biology from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, The Emil Christian Hansen Gold Medal from Denmark, and a Wallenberg Scholar Award from the Wallenberg Foundation. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization, EMBO.