Thomas Tomasiak

Our bodies face the tremendous task of sorting, organizing, and safely dealing with the millions of small molecules they encounter every day. These chemicals include nutrients, drugs, and toxins with profound implications for our health and for drug design. Our lab focuses on the main systems that our bodies use to recognize and sort these compounds, especially transporters from the ATP Binding Cassette (ABC) and Solute Carrier Superfamily (SLC) families using a combination of biochemistry, genetics, and structural biology. These transporters have presented challenges owing to their instability once extracted from our cells membranes. The formulation of new lipid isolation systems, new analytical methods, and powerful new structural biology tools, especially powerful new electron microscopes, have cracked these problems open and present an exciting new forefront in understanding fundamental biology as well as in drug design.