Ylva Ivarsson

Professor at Department of Chemistry for Life Sciences; Biochemistry; Ivarsson group

Telephone:
+46 18 471 40 38
E-mail:
Ylva.Ivarsson@kemi.uu.se
Visiting address:
Husargatan 3
752 37 Uppsala
Postal address:
Box 576
75123 Uppsala

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Short presentation

Ylva Ivarsson is a full professor of Biochemistry with a research team funded by the Swedish Research Council, and EU Marie Curie ETN and others. The research of the group is interdisciplinary and combines biochemical and biophysical methods with bioinformatics and cell-based assays to study motif-based protein-protein interactions.

Biography

Ylva Ivarsson received her PhD in Biochemistry from Uppsala University in 2006, working with Bengt Mannervik. She then joined Maurizio Brunori’s group at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where she studied protein folding and misfolding. After two and a half years in Italy, she moved to the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium to work with Pascale Zimmermann on protein–phospholipid interactions supported by an EMBO long term fellowship.

In 2012, Ylva joined the Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto in a shared appointment between the groups of Sachdev Sidhu and Philip M. Kim. There, she pioneered proteomic peptide phage display, ProP-PD, a powerful approach for large-scale discovery of protein–peptide interactions. The method opened new possibilities for systematically mapping the short linear motif interactions that shape cellular signaling.

In 2013, Ylva was awarded a Young Investigator grant from the Swedish Research Council and established her independent research group at the Department of Chemistry, Uppsala University. Since then, her group has received several prestigious grants, she was granted tenure in 2017 and promoted to full professor in 2020. Currently, she is also heading the Biochemistry research unit.

Research

The Ivarsson group explores the molecular interaction networks that govern cellular signal transduction, with a particular focus on the intrinsically disordered regions of the proteome. These flexible, motif-rich regions have long been difficult to interpret, yet they encode many of the interaction switches that control cellular behavior. By combining ProP-PD with complementary experimental and computational approaches, and through close collaboration Dr Norman Davey, the group provides functional information for intrinsically disordered regions across both the human and viral proteomes. This work helps reveal how short linear motifs (SLiMs) connect proteins into signaling networks, how viruses hijack host cellular machinery, and how previously uncharacterized disordered regions contribute to biology and disease. The data is made available through the ProP-PD portal: https://slim-tools.org/proppd/

The most recent news from the group of is the release of ASHI: An Atlas of Short Linear Motif-Mediated Human Protein-Protein Interactions, which represent a massive, collaborative work that vastly expands the human SLiM-based interactome: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.03.735260v1

Prof. Ivarsson is currently coordinating IDPro “Intrinsically disordered proteins in health and disease". IDPro is a Doctoral Network under the Horizon-Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions focused on aims to deepen our understanding of the molecular principles that govern interactions and regulatory mechanisms within cellular networks. For more information see https://idpro.elte.hu/network

Ylva Ivarsson

Publications

Recent publications

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Articles, review/survey

Chapters in book

Manuscripts (preprints)

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