Evolution and Mechanisms of Chaperone Action

Speaker: dr inż. Bartłomiej Tomiczek Laboratory of Evolutionary Biochemistry, Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology UG & MUG

Talk:  Evolution and Mechanisms of Chaperone Action

Time: 22.05.2026, 10:00

Venue: Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology, Abrahama 58, hall 042B

Bartłomiej Tomiczek is a Principal Investigator at the Laboratory of Evolutionary Biochemistry, where he leads NCN-funded OPUS 21 and SONATA BIS projects. He earned his PhD in a group of Prof. Max Telford at University College London, where he used newly generated genomic sequencing data to resolve animal phylogenies. He also worked under Prof. Christophe Dessimoz (University of Lausanne) on development of the OMA orthology database for gene annotation and gene‑family evolution. He is also an author of a large genomic survey of fission yeasts, published in Nature Genetics, which traced their arrival in the Americas to the period of European colonialism.

Since joining the Laboratory of Evolutionary Biochemistry in 2018, he has combined computational and experimental approaches to investigate the mechanisms and evolution of molecular chaperones. His work combines ancestral sequence reconstruction with the biochemical “resurrection” of ancestral proteins to uncover how novel protein functions evolved. In a recent PNAS publication, his team demonstrated how J‑domain proteins evolved the ability to disassemble and suppress disease‑associated amyloid aggregates, a hallmark of neurodegeneration.