EMBL and my interests

I like signal transduction and doing fancy light microscopy [1]. Hence, I looked forward talking to Philippe Bastiaens, who did a great deal of sophisticated fluorescent life imaging (FLIM) to elucidate pathways and make useful assertion about physiological levels of proteins, substrates and in one recent paper even about a gradient in vivo [2]. To my displeasedness, Bastiaens was too good to stay in Heidelberg and was offered a leading position at the Max-Plank Institute Dortmund, staying at EMBL only as a visiting group leader. «yeah!»

Fortunately, there are a couple of other quite interesting groups. One of which, led by Carsten Schultz, collaborated with Philippe on several occasions and provided the nifty underlying protective chemistry of the substrates he used [2]. A proposed PhD project leads deeper into signal transduction and by neat approaches allows to more or less dynamically switch parts of a pathway on or off [3]. This would enable analyses of the pathway branch without screwing up the physiological levels.

Other research units are concerned about chromosomal organisation and Matthias Hentze explores the mechanisms of translational repression by RNAi, having a paper submitted for review recently that elaborates on pseudopolysomes being observed on repressed mRNAs (hot stuff).

[1] As I currently do in my final year research project, by exploiting Tom Kerppola's wonderful bimolecular fluorescent complementation assay.
[2] Yudushkin IA, Schleifenbaum A, Kinkhabwala A, Neel BG, Schultz C, Bastiaens PI. Live-cell imaging of enzyme-substrate interaction reveals spatial regulation of PTP1B. Science. 2007 Jan 5;315(5808):115-9.
[3] Sorry guys and gals, detailed information not to be disclosed. However, some research is aiming to produce switches that may be genomically encoded.