About Us
EMBL is an inter-governmental organisation currently led by the Director General, Prof. Iain Mattaj, appointed by the EMBL Council. The Council is composed of all 20 Member States one associate member state of the Laboratory. Each Member State is represented by up to two delegates, who may be accompanied by advisers. Associate member states have observer status on the EMBL Council and are represented by up to two delegates.
EMBL Hamburg is situated in one of the most beautiful areas of the Hanseatic city of Hamburg in the Northern part of Germany. Hamburg is centred around its harbour, which has a long tradition of oversea trade, and offers a wide variety of cultural activities. In the close vicinity of EMBL, there are diverse neighbourhoods ranging from residential, wealthy suburbs like Blankenese, to areas with a lot of students, entertainment and a multicultural ambience like St. Pauli, Altona and Ottensen.
EMBL Hamburg is located on the site of DESY (German Synchrotron Research Centre) that provides synchrotron radiation (SR) through its DORIS positron storage ring. This radiation is used to study the structure and function of proteins using state-of-the-art equipment and methods. EMBL Hamburg operates six SR beam lines, five of which are dedicated to biocrystallography and one to small angle scattering of biological samples.
EMBL Hamburg has a well-established record for the development of novel, innovative technologies in biological applications of SR. These started with the first diffraction and scattering experiments in molecular structural biology in Hamburg more than thirty years ago. Later, the first imaging plate scanner, now standard equipment in any biocrystallographic laboratory, was developed by the EMBL instrumentation group, and was subsequently commercialised by the spin-off company MARRESEARCH. At present, world-leading software packages for the automation of data interpretation have been developed and are used internationally in a large number of projects. One is the ARP/wARP package that, in its current version, allows automatic X-ray structure determination with X-ray data higher than 2.5 Å resolution within a few hours. The other is called ATSAS and allows construction of low resolutuion three-dimensional models of proteins and macromolecular complexes in solution from small angle scattering data.
These research developments are paralleled by an integrated approach to carry out scientifically demanding projects in structural biology. For this, EMBL Hamburg offers facilities in molecular biology, heterologous expression in prokaryotic and eukaryotic hosts, protein purification, biophysical characterisation and crystallisation, complementing our X-ray data acquisition and processing infrastructure. Structure determination and interpretation is carried out on high performance computers and state-of-the-art graphics facilities.
Our biological interests include, inter alia, regulation of transcription and translation, viral replication, protein-ligand interactions in signaling proteins and protein kinases, proteins from extremophiles and metallo proteins in different redox states (EXAFS). Many projects are in collaboration with other units of EMBL. For further details see the contributions of the EMBL Hamburg faculty. EMBL Hamburg is one of the nodes of the European Structural Genomics Project, SPINE. EMBL is also coordinating a Structural Genomics consortium targeting 150 genes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, by using novel technologies in comparative proteomics.