Oleg Bulgakov was graduated from Moscow Institute of Fine Chemical Technology, named after M.V. Lomonosov and defended his Ph.D. thesis in Shemyakin & Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry in Moscow, Russia. The thesis was devoted to purification and characterization of novel insectotoxin from Black Widow spider venom. He did his first post-doctoral work at CEA, Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France where he developed purification of alkaline phosphatase and its mutants for X-ray crystallography. Then he joined The Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Sciences at The University of Tennessee, Memphis where he studied interactions between human nuclear receptors and their ligands. He characterized several non-steroidal synthetic drugs that potentially could serve for the treatment of prostate cancer. Oleg joined Dr. Tiansen Li’s Laboratory in 2000 where he had been involved in the study of proteins which mutations caused retina degeneration on mouse models. He prepared and characterized non-survival FKBP8-KO mouse model and showed that this protein plays an important role in sonic hedgehog pathway in mouse development. In recent years he had been involved in gene therapy studies. He prepared and characterized a number of aav-vectors with mOps and human RK promoters with human and mouse AIPL1, TULP1, RPGR and RPGRIP genes, studding them on corresponding mouse models. Currently Oleg continues the study of the gene and protein structure of mouse and human RPGR.

Ophthalmology, Neuroscience and Cell Biology