Christian SalessePh.D.

Christian Salesse is a full-time researcher at the Centre de recherche du CHU de Québec – Laval University, and full professor in Laval University’s Department of Ophthalmology. He graduated in biophysics from Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR). He was then a postdoctoral fellow at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, Germany. He then became professor at the UQTR for 14 years until he moved on to work at Laval University, in 2002. He has been a fellow from Fonds de Recherche – Québec Santé (FRQS) from the Junior 1 to the National level. He has also been Adjunct Professor at Jilin University in Changchun, China since 1995. He was an invited professor at several universities in France and Portugal.

His expertise is in the field of visual phototransduction and visual cycle, and the proteins involved in these processes. These processes require the binding of most of these proteins to membranes. We therefore perform membrane binding measurements of proteins. We are using simple model membranes such as lipid monolayers and bilayers to characterize their membrane binding. Protein binding to monolayers of saturated and highly polyunsaturated neutral or negatively charged lipids, that are typical of photoreceptors, is characterized by performing measurements of maximum insertion pressure, fluorescence microscopy, ellipsometry, as well as infrared spectroscopy (PM-IRRAS which also allows to determine protein orientation). Steady state fluorescence spectroscopy and fluorescence lifetime are used to characterize protein binding to lipid bilayers. The proteins we are studying also often have enzymatic activities; we have thus developed methods to characterize the activity of some of these enzymes. Moreover, we use nuclear magnetic resonance to determine the structure of a protein involved in the visual cycle.