Dr Alma Eva Perez Perrino

Alma Eva Perez Perrino is a postdoctoral fellow at Weill Cornell Medicine and is also the National Secretary for Españoles Científicos en USA (ECUSA). She is currently working in the development and application of High-Speed Atomic Force Microscopy (HS-AFM) methods to analyse single molecule kinetics of membrane proteins.

During her PhD, she explored the elastic properties of biomolecules and polymers using bimodal AFM through simultaneous excitation of the first two eigenmodes of the AFM cantilever.

Dr Alma Eva Perez Perrino

Recent AFM-related papers:

• Perrino, A., Miyagi, A. and Scheuring, S. (2021). ‘Single molecule kinetics of bacteriorhodopsin by HS-AFM’. Nature Communications, 12, 7225.

• Benaglia, S., Gisbert, V., Perrino, A., Amo, C. and Garcia, R. (2018). ‘Fast and high-resolution mapping of elastic properties of biomolecules and polymers with bimodal AFM’. Nature Protocols, 13, pp. 2890-2907.

• Amo, C., Perrino, A., Payam, A. and Garcia, R. (2017). ‘Mapping Elastic Properties of Heterogenous Materials in Liquid with Angstrom-Scale Resolution’. ACS Nano, 11(9), pp. 8650-8659.

• Perrino, A. and Garcia, R. (2016). ‘How soft is a single protein? The stress-strain curve of antibody pentamers with 5 pN and 50 pm resolutions’. Nanoscale, 8(17), pp. 9151-9158.

Biography: Alma received a BSc degree in Physics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) in 2011 and a MSc in Nanotechnology from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) in 2013. Following this, she completed a PhD at the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (ICMM-CSIC) (Spain) in 2016 under the supervision of Professor Ricardo Garcia. Her research involved using dynamic AFM modes for the quantification of nanomechanical properties of biomolecules and biomaterials in their native environment.

After her PhD dissertation, she spent 12 months as a postdoctoral researcher in the same group before joining as a postdoctoral research fellow in Professor Simon Scheuring’s lab at Weill Cornell Medicine (USA) in early 2018. That same year she was also the recipient of the two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Ramon Areces Foundation.

One of Alma’s most recent projects employs a method called Line Scan HS-AFM (LS-HS-AFM) to study the single molecule kinetics of wild-type bacteriorhodopsin (bR) with millisecond temporal resolution. Using LS-HS-AFM, she determined with short light pulses that the cytoplasmic gate opens 2.9 ms after photon absorption and stays open for protein capture for 13.2 ms.

Alma is also involved in science management, advocacy and mentoring through ECUSA. With her role as National Secretary of the association she has had the opportunity to participate in the design and implementation of multiple projects such as the REBECA mentoring program for early-stage researchers and the creation of a handbook discussing the steps and requirements to obtain the teaching certification for Spanish public universities, ANECA.

Twitter: @Alma_P_Perrino

Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alma-eva-perez-perrino/

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