Department 1 Protein Evolution

Director: Dr. Andrei Lupas
Secretary: Karin Lehmann

Telefon: +49 (0)7071 - 601-340
Fax: +49 (0)7071 - 601-349

Staff: Alphabetical List

Proteins are essential building blocks of living cells; indeed, life can be viewed as resulting substantially from the chemical activity of proteins. Because of their importance, it is hardly surprising that ancestors for most proteins observed today were already present at the time of the 'last common ancestor', a primordial organism from which all life on Earth is descended. How did the first proteins arise (Protein Evolution)? How can we bring a taxonomic order (Protein Classification) to the diversity of forms that evolved from them? These two questions are at the center of our scientific efforts, on which we bring to bear methods in bioinformatics, protein biochemistry and structural biology.

Results from our work

Software

Publications

Associated Research Groups

Chaperonins and cellular protein folding (Jörg Martin)

Structure Biology (Kornelius Zeth)

The Bacterial Cell Surface: Structure, Biochemistry, Pathogenicity (Dirk Linke)

Specificity of adaptor proteins involved in signal transduction pathways and endocytosis (Yvonne Groemping)