Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Focus of research:

* Molecular Crowding and its impact on cellular processes
* Protein Reaction Networks and their thermodynamic quantification

I am interested in the quantification of cytoplasmic processes.
Several major differences distinguish the cytoplasm from solutions used in regular in vitro biochemical experiments. My research currently focuses on two major aspects of the cytoplasm: (1) The cytoplasm is heavily crowded with high concentrations of macromolecules, small organic molecules, and ions. (2) In the cell, thousands of different molecular species interact specifically to form large reaction networks

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Graphical representation of a 3-state system involving protein, ligand, osmolyte and water.

Both of these aspects include major challenges. Under crowded conditions the concentrations that occur in equilibrium and rate equations have to be replaced by chemical activities. However, there is currently little known about chemical activities in complex biochemical systems. In addition, the sheer number of experiments necessary to quantify a multi-component system goes far beyond classical approaches to cellular biochemistry.

These problems are challenging, but solvable. My combination of Statistical Mechanical theory with appropriate experiments has been already successful. To be able to handle the large number of experiments that are required for quantifying reaction networks, true high-throughput instrumentation is necessary. An appropriate high- throughput spectrophotometer is anticipated to be available soon.