Rafayel Petrosyan

Head of Laboratory,Dr.

E-mail: rafayel.petrosyan@physiol.sci.am

Our broad goal is to reveal the molecular mechanisms through which proteins perform their vital functions. Primarily, we are interested in understanding the molecular mechanism of long-term memory and the role of functional amyloids there. We are also interested in understanding the key differences between toxic and functional amyloids and the mechanisms of their formation. We use single-molecule force spectroscopy experiments, molecular dynamics simulations, theoretical modeling, and advanced machine learning algorithms to address the abovementioned questions.

L. M. Cortez, A. J. Morrison, C. R. Garen, S. Patterson, T. Uyesugi, R. Petrosyan, R. V. Sekar, M. J. Harms*, M. T. Woodside*, and V. L. Sim*
“Probing the origin of prion protein misfolding via reconstruction of ancestral proteins” Protein Sci. (2022) 31 (12) e4477.
R. Petrosyan, A. Narayan, and M. T. Woodside
“Single-molecule force spectroscopy of protein folding”
J. Mol. Biol. (2021) 433 (20), 167207.
R. Petrosyan, S. Patra, N. Rezajooei, C. Garen, and M.T. Woodside*
“Unfolded and intermediate states of PrP play a key role in the mechanism of action of an antiprion chaperone” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. (2021) 118 (9), e2010213118.
R. Petrosyan*
“Unfolding force definition and the unified model for the mean unfolding force dependence on the loading rate” J. Stat. Mech.: Theory Exp. (2020) (3), 033201.
D.A.N. Foster, R. Petrosyan, A.G.T. Pyo, A. Hoffmann, F. Wang, and M.T. Woodside*
“Probing position-dependent diffusion in folding reactions using single-molecule force spectroscopy”
Biophys. J. (2018) 114 (7), 1657-1666.
R. Petrosyan*
“Improved approximations for some polymer extension models”
Rheol. Acta (2017) 56 (1), 21-26.
R. Petrosyan, C.A. Bippes, S. Walheim, D. Harder, D. Fotiadis, T. Schimmel, D. Alsteens, and D.J. Müller*
“Single-molecule force spectroscopy of membrane proteins from membranes freely spanning across nanoscopic
pores”, Nano Lett. (2015) 15 (5), 3624-3633.
E.P. Petrov*, R. Petrosyan, and P. Schwille
“Translational and rotational diffusion of micrometer-sized solid domains in lipid membranes”
Soft Matter (2012) 8 (29), 7552-7555.