Oliver Thon
thonoliver.bsky.social
Oliver Thon
@thonoliver.bsky.social
PhD Student @ Hänelt lab, Goethe University Frankfurt
Reposted by Oliver Thon
1/14
Happy (but mostly relieved) to share my dream project with @boudkerlab.bsky.social, now published in @natsmb.nature.com! We used evolution, protein engineering & cryoEM to uncover how ion coupling in glutamate transporters works, and how it evolved.🧵
Free article: go.nature.com/4oRUC1q
Evolutionary analysis reveals the origin of sodium coupling in glutamate transporters - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology
Reddy et al. used ancestral protein reconstruction, cryo-electron microscopy and functional assays to elucidate how a secondary active transporter evolved to harness the energy of sodium gradients to ...
go.nature.com
September 12, 2025 at 12:08 AM
Reposted by Oliver Thon
Last week, we had the pleasure of welcoming Prof. Syma Khalid. PhD representatives of the IRTG board organised a week of talks & events. Syma shared her expertise in MD simulation, science communication & insights into her own research career. Thank you for such inspiring days! @sykhalid.bsky.social
August 29, 2025 at 8:48 AM
Reposted by Oliver Thon
🎉We’re celebrating the #SCALE-it-Best-PhD-Awards-2025, honoring exceptional researchers! 🎓 This year, three remarkable dissertations were recognized, selected from a highly competitive and multidisciplinary pool of candidates. 🧵
June 5, 2025 at 9:41 AM
Reposted by Oliver Thon
🎉 We’re absolutely thrilled: SCALE has been selected as a DFG Excellence Cluster!
A huge thank you to our incredible team—this would not have been possible without your dedication and talent. 🙌 @dfg.de
#ClustersOfExcellence #SCALEcluster 🧵
May 23, 2025 at 7:27 AM
Reposted by Oliver Thon
Solène’s 4.5 years of postdoctoral work in our lab (she started just before the corona pandemic) has now been published. A heroic effort that revealed -at the single molecule level- that ATP drives the dissociation of an ECF transporter complex under turnover conditions. See rdcu.be/elTKc
Single-molecule visualization of ATP-induced dynamics of the subunit composition of an ECF transporter complex under turnover conditions
Nature Communications - The association and dissociation dynamics of the ECF transporter complex for vitamin B12 are visualized by single-molecule FRET, highlighting the original transport...
rdcu.be
May 13, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Reposted by Oliver Thon
This took us a while and I am all the happier it is finally out! I thought that simply adding ATP to purified potassium channel KtrAB should be sufficient to stabilize its active state. I was so wrong...
Read the full story on how an IDR facilitates channel opening upon membrane interaction.
A short intrinsically disordered region at KtrB’s N-terminus facilitates allosteric regulation of K+ channel KtrAB
Nature Communications - KtrAB is a major potassium uptake system that has been linked to the pathogenesis of many infectious bacteria. Here the authors show that KtrB from Vibrio alginolyticus...
www.nature.com
May 12, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Oliver Thon
Finally, it's out in Nat Commun! Excellent collaboration with my colleagues and friends in Frankfurt, especially @ihaenelt.bsky.social and Janet Vonck.
This work demonstrates the role of the intrinsically disordered N-terminus of KtrAB in channel opening.

Full story here: rdcu.be/elDYO
A short intrinsically disordered region at KtrB’s N-terminus facilitates allosteric regulation of K+ channel KtrAB
Nature Communications - KtrAB is a major potassium uptake system that has been linked to the pathogenesis of many infectious bacteria. Here the authors show that KtrB from Vibrio alginolyticus...
rdcu.be
May 12, 2025 at 9:34 AM
Reposted by Oliver Thon
Ball-and-chain inactivation of a human large conductance calcium-activated potassium channel pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39971906/ #cryoem
February 20, 2025 at 10:28 AM
Reposted by Oliver Thon
In a great collaboration with @hummerlab.bsky.social and the Kräusslich lab: HIV capsid doesn't break at the NPC; instead, it cracks open the NPC itself! Details in Cell: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... @mpibp.bsky.social @uniheidelberg.bsky.social A thread below:
January 17, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Oliver Thon
Take a look at our paper from last week where we probed the Molecular Architecture of Synaptic Vesicles by cryo-ET and integrative structural analysis

We found that V-ATPases interact with synaptophysin and describe some other molecules of this exciting organelle
🧠🔬❄️

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
December 3, 2024 at 9:53 AM