Research

EMBL Hamburg’s laboratories are on the German Synchrotron Research Centre (DESY) campus, with synchrotron radiation (DORIS-III) and laser (FLASH) facilities available. The PETRA storage ring is presently being converted into a world-leading, dedicated synchrotron radiation facility, PETRA III, and a powerful X-ray Free Electron Laser will be built during the next few years. EMBL is building a new integrated facility, EMBL@PETRA3, for applications in structural biology at the PETRA III ring. It will comprise three state-of-the-art beamlines for protein crystallography and small angle X-ray scattering, complemented by facilities for sample preparation and characterisation and data evaluation. EMBL Hamburg will also become one of the main partners in the future Centre for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB) on the DESY campus.

EMBL Hamburg has set up an ambitious research programme for structures of multifunctional proteins and protein complexes of biomedical relevance. Present research interests by group leaders include cell surface receptors, plant receptors, protein assemblies in muscle cells, protein kinases and phosphatases, and protein translocation into peroxisomes. In addition, several groups and teams have joined a common effort to determine 3D structures from potential drug drug targets of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, with the aim of contributing to the discovery of new drugs against this deadly disease. Beyond the tools in structural biology that are available on-site, EMBL Hamburg groups are engaged in many interdisciplinary collaborations with colleagues from other EMBL units, enabling access to a large variety of in vitro and in vivo functional techniques, including cellular imaging techniques.

EMBL Hamburg also has a well-established record for the development of novel, innovative technologies in structural biology. World-leading software packages for the automation of data interpretation have been developed and are used in a large number of projects across the world’s research community. One is the ARP/wARP package that allows automatic X-ray structure determination. It is integrated into an automated software pipeline, Auto-Rickshaw, which has also been compiled at EMBL Hamburg. Another package, ATSAS, allows the automatic interpretation of small angle X-ray scattering data for structural shape determination. Finally, there are two groups that focus on the development and construction of new equipment for experimental stations in structural biology, using synchrotron radiation. Present efforts focus on the installation of new robotics that allow automatic placement of biological samples into specialised synchrotron experiment facilities.

Matthias Wilmanns
Head of EMBL Hamburg

Last update March 2010