TUM Supervisors

Prof. Michael Sattler is Director of the Institute of Structural Biology at HMGU and Chair for Biomolecular NMR Spectroscopy at the Technische Universität München (TUM) since 2007. He has been trained in the development of methods for biomolecular NMR spectroscopy with C. Griesinger during my doctoral studies at University of Frankfurt, and in structural biology as a postdoc working with Dr. Stephen W. Fesik at Abbott Laboratories (Illinois, USA). At Abbott he performed structural studies of biomedically important proteins in cellular signaling and apoptosis: Shc-PTB/Trk (Nature 1995), Bcl-xL (Nature 1996;Science 1997). During this time the Fesik lab developed the SAR by NMR approach for structure-based drug design. As a group leader at EMBL (1997-2006) Michael Sattler established a research programme on structural biology in RNA-based gene regulation: pre-mRNA splicing (Science 2001, 2006), RNAi (Argonaute PAZ domain, Nature 2003) and cellular signalling and started to investigate molecular mechanisms of peroxisome biogenesis.

 

The Sattler lab develops and applies solution state NMR methods for studies of large protein complexes. Research topics focus on structural analysis of RNA-based gene regulation (Nature 2011, Nature Struct Mol Biol 2014; Nature 2014), i.e. protein-RNA and protein-protein interactions in the regulation of alternative splicing and mRNA metabolism and their link with human disease-related pathways. In collaborations with researchers at TUM and HMGU the group studies molecular mechansims of protein chaperones, including efforts towards the development of small molecule inhibitors (i.e. Hsp90: Mol Cell 2014; Nature Medicine 2015). He develops and applies integrated structural biology approaches combining NMR, crystallography and small angle X-ray or neutron scattering (SAXS/SANS) to investigate the structure and especially dynamics of protein complexes in gene regulation and other important cellular pathways (Method Enzym 2015). The Sattler group has established a research programme on structure-based-drug discovery at the Institute of Structural Biology at HMGU. State-of-the-art facilities are available for ultra-high-field NMR (http://www.bnmrz.org), fragment-based screening (600 MHz NMR), crystallization, in-house SAXS, protein expression & purification, as well as medicinal chemistry. Regular access is available to synchrotron beamlines for crystallography and SAX