Autor: Jean-Luc Popot

Jean-Luc Popot, born 1948, studied biology, chemistry, and biophysics in Orléans and Orsay. In 1971, he took a permanent position with the Collège de France. In J.‑P. Changeux’s laboratory, at the Pasteur Institute, he applied electrophysiology and biophysical and biochemical approaches to functional and structural studies of the nicotinic acetyl­cho­li­ne receptor. In 1982, he joined D.M. Engelman at Yale University as a visiting scientist. His work at Yale, which bore princi­pal­ly on refolding bacterio­rhod­opsin from dena­tu­red fragments and studying the refolded structure crystallographically, led the two of them to propose, in 1990, an influential model for the folding of α‑helical membrane proteins. In 1985, he joined the laboratory of P. Joliot at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique (Paris). His group car­ried out neutron diffraction and model building work on bacterio­rhod­opsin and bio­che­mical studies on Photo­sys­tem II and cytochrome b6 f. In 1996, he became Research Director at the Centre National de la Recher­­che Scienti­fi­que and created his own laboratory, where the X‑ray struc­tu­re of the b6 f was solved in 2003. In parallel, he pursued the development of sequence analysis approa­ches and, in collabo­ra­tion with chemists and physical chemists, designed and validated non-conventional surfact­ants aimed at facilitating membrane protein solu­tion studies, most notably amphi­­pathic polymers (‘amphipols’) and fluorinated surfactants. He retired in 2013 and, along with his wife, splits his time between restoring an old house in Languedoc, reading, writing, hiking, photographing, cooking, and enjoying the company of kith and kin.