Hans Langedijk (»Add to Infobox)

Pepscan SME: Pepscan systems BV Phone:  +31 320 238515 Email:  h.langedijkpepscan.com

General description: Hans Langedijk is senior scientist at Pepscan. He has experience in synthetic peptide technology and structural biology. The core activity of Pepscan is to map the binding sites of interacting macromolecules and subsequently to reconstruct these sites as small synthetic bioactive molecules. This technology, which is improved continuously, will help to solve major problems related to the translation of the mapped protein interaction sites through (supramolecular molecular) peptide chemistry into molecules with appropriate bioactivity. Pepscan will take care of the design, preparation and screening of synthetic peptide libraries and subsequentely of the reconstruction of sites as relatively simple and small peptide like molecules. Therefore expertise with respect to Pepscan technology (library building and screening) will be combined with structure-function studies of proteins and supramolecular chemistry Role in RUBICON: Several sequence motifs for ubiquitin or SUMO-dependent destruction have been defined, but their precise structural aspects are often not yet understood. It will be essential to study the three-dimensional context of the degrons, as well as the specific SUMO-target sites to understand their specific roles, to identify them better and to provide a template for prediction in novel targets. For these studies good understanding of their target specificities is important. In order to delineate the sumoylation site, we will synthesize and screen peptides with candidate sumoylation sites within different secondary structural setting (helix, sheet), different location within the secondary structure and different neighbouring residues to in order to describe the primary sequence motif and structural motif of the sumoylaiton site.