The main research results:
Over the two-year course of the project, the Fellow has established herself as a valuable asset of Dr. Jindra’s research team. She demonstrated her research skills in a study aimed at better mechanistic understanding of JH signaling. This investigation has been carried out in a collaboration with a leading Czech scientific institution, the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (IOCB) in Prague. The joined research effort resulted in a high-quality publication on ligand stereoselectivity of JH receptor with the first authorship for the Fellow (Bittova et al (2019) J.Biol. Chem. 294, 410-423). The Fellow has also participated in a study on JH receptor structure and function pursued in collaboration with the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). That contribution has earned the Fellow an authorship on a manuscript ready for submission (Jindra, M. , McKinstry, B., Nebl, T., Bittova, L., Ren, B., Xu, Z., Shaw, J., Phan, T., Lu, L., Low, J., Mackay J., Song, X., Sparrow, L., Lovrecz, G. and Hill, R.: Characterisation of Purified Recombinant Juvenile Hormone Receptor Proteins from Tribolium castaneum and Aedes aegypti).
The collaboration with CSIRO jump-started the current MSCA project by providing crucial data on phosphorylation target sites of JH receptor (JHR). Based on this information, three specific aims have been proposed to study: (1)Effects of JHR phosphorylation on JH-dependent transcription and JH binding (2) Effects of JHR phosphorylation on nuclear localization and protein-protein interactions (3) Role of JHR phosphorylation in JH-signaling in vivo.
The Fellow has made a major progress on all these aims. Importantly, novel nuclear localization signal motifs in both T. castaneum and D. melanogaster JHR were discovered in the course of this work. Very exciting findings came from mutations in phoshorylation sites of Drosophila JHR. Flies with mutated JHR display strong developmental defects, such as rotated genitalia in males or reduced fertility.
Together, these promising results have already started to reveal novel and significant aspects of JHR signaling mechanism. They will certainly improve our understanding of the role of post-translational modifications in regulation of insect development.
In the two-year course of the MSCA fellowship, the Fellow has mastered the basics of insect developmental genetics in both theory and practice, greatly expanding her research potential. She is now able to design and carry out independent experiments in her newly adopted field.
Dissemination and communication:
Besides an excellent progress on the proposed research listed above, the Fellow has made a strong connection with the local scientific and public community:
The Fellow took a major part in collaboration with IOCB, a leading Czech scientific institution, that yielded a Nature index journal publication mentioned above. The Fellow has exerted her teaching experience at the University of South Bohemia, teaching four semesters of biochemistry practicals for an elite Bachelor’s Programme „Biological Chemistry“. The Fellow gave a lecture about her work at Jírovcova highschool with an enthusiastic feedback from both students and teachers.
The Fellow has been actively engaged in promoting her research interests in public: She has been invited to the Czech broadcasting company as an „Afternoon guest“ to familiarize the public with new trends in bioscience. She covered a similar topic in a public „Academic half-hour“ lecture series organized by Biology Centre CAS. The Fellow took an opportunity to share her experience with writing a successful MSCA proposal and implementing the awarded fellowship in a seminar organized by the Regional Contact Organization South Bohemia in collaboration with Technology Centre CAS.
