Draft:Mikhail Kudryashev

Mikhail (Misha) Kudryashev (Russian - Михаил Александрович Кудряшев, born in the former USSR in Moscow), is a well recognized structural biologist and a Group Leader at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine and a Professor at Charité – Universitätsmedizin, Berlin.

Early life and education
Misha was born in the 1980s in Moscow in a family of Soviet chemistry scientists (Nadezhda Kudryasheva and Aleksandr Kudryashev), who were graduating from Moscow State University. At the age of four, his family moved to Krasnoyarsk for their academic career. His childhood in Krasnoyarsk was filled with basketball, chess, being part of a computer science club and taking care of his younger sister Galina.

After finishing school at Gymnasium №13 (former school №41) in Akademgorodok, Misha enrolled at Siberian Federal University's (former Krasnoyarsk State University) Faculty of Physics, Department of Biophysics. He graduated with honors in 2005.

Career
From 2005 to 2009, Misha worked on his PhD thesis at the University of Heidelberg, within the Parasitology Unit at the Center for Infectious Diseases in the laboratory of Professor Friedrich Frischknecht, the research group investigates the mechanisms by which malaria parasites navigate from mosquitoes to human hosts. Kudryashev developed image analysis tools for drug screening and visualized the architecture of parasites using cryo-electron microscopy.

From 2009 to 2015, Dr. Kudryashev was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, in the laboratories of Professor Henning Stahlberg and Dr Marek Basler and studied bacterial secretion systems.

In 2015, Dr. Kudryashev won the prestigious Sofia Kovalevskaya Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Subsequently, he established his own research group at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics and the Buchmann Institute for Molecular Life Sciences at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main focussing on ion channels but also contributing seminal work on malaria MSP1 structure.

Since 2021, Dr. Kudryashev leads the "In situ Structural Biology" lab at Berlin's Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine within the Helmholtz Society, continuing his investigations into the structure and activation of ion channels. In 2022, in recognition of his expertise, he was appointed as a W2 Professor at Charité – Universitätsmedizin, Berlin. Kudryashev and his team developed TomoBEAR, a versatile pipeline for cryo-electron tomographic data processing and preliminary subtomogram averaging (StA), based on best practices in the scientific research group.

Research
Kudryashev's research group aims at understanding the mechanisms of membrane proteins and their complexes using cryo-electron microscopy. Their focus centers on understanding how these proteins undergo structural changes in response to external stimuli, particularly in ion channels, which play crucial roles in cell signaling and multiple types of disease.

They utilize two cryo-EM methods: single-particle cryo-EM, which involves purifying proteins and imaging them in 2D to determine 3D structures, and cryo-electron tomography, which allows for 3D imaging of various biological entities without purification. Their work has uncovered insights into protein functionality, such as the activation of the serotonin receptor 5-HT3 and the structure of malaria parasite protein MSP1.

However, extracting protein structures from cryo-electron tomograms poses significant challenges due to their size and resolution limitations. To overcome this, Kudryashev's team develops tools leveraging high-performance computing and neural networks to streamline structural determination processes. This approach not only enhances efficiency but also allows researchers to focus on addressing scientific questions and achieving higher resolutions.