Professor, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen

• Dr. phil. nat. University of Frankfurt (1986, Prof. Dr. H. Kessler)


• Postdoctoral Fellow at Lab. for Physical Chemistry, ETH Zürich (1986 - 1989, Prof. Dr. R. R. Ernst)


• Full Professor for Organic Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt (1990 - 2000)


• Appointed as Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (1998)

Major Research Interests

In the department, we develop NMR spectroscopic methods and apply them to the investigation of water soluble and membrane proteins, nucleic acids and their complexes as well as drug/target complexes. Structural biology projects are performed in the context of signal transduction, ion channels, G-protein coupled receptors, cytoskeletal proteins, catalytic RNA, enzymes and drug/target complexes using NMR as well as X-ray crystallography to characterize structure and dynamics. A rather big project is the investigation of proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases that are studied in the context of the CMPB and involve almost all resources of the department. Methods developments are aimed at pushing the limits of sensitivity for NMR spectroscopic detection (e.g. DNP), developing the measurement of structurally and dynamically relevant parameters, establishing methods to describe structural ensembles for folded and intrinsically disordered proteins and developing structural proteomics tools. For solid state NMR investigations, pulse sequences that allow structure determination of uniformly labelled membrane proteins as well as oligomers and fibrils formed from proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases have been successfully developed.


Homepage Department/Research Group

http://medusa.nmr.mpibpc.mpg.de/



Selected Recent Publications

• Ban D, Funk M, Gulich R, Egger D, Sabo TM, Walter KFA, Bryn Fenwick R, Giller K, Pichierri F, de Groot BL, Lange OF, Grubmüller H, Salvatella X, Wolf M, Loidl A, Kree R, Becker S, Lakomek NA, Lee D, Lunkenheimer P, Griesinger C (2011) Kinetics of Conformational Sampling in Ubiquitin. Angew Chem Int Ed, DOI:10.1002/anie.201105086


• Kumar A, Heise H,. Blommers MJJJ, Krastel P, Schmitt E, Petersen F, Jeganathan S, Mandelkow EM, Carlomagno T, Griesinger C, Baldus M (2010) Interaction of Epothilone B (Patupilone) with Microtubules as Detected by Two-Dimensional Solid State NMRSpectroscopy. Angew Chem Int Ed 49: 7666-69


• Karpinar P, Gajula Balija MB, Kuegler S, Opazo F, Rezaei-Ghaleh N, Wender N, Kim HJ, Taschenberger G, Falkenburger BH, Heise H, Kumar A, Riedel D, Fichtner L, Voigt A, Braus GH, Giller K, Becker S, Herzig A, Baldus M, Jaeckle H, Eimer S, Schulz JB, Griesinger C, Zweckstetter M (2009) Pre-fibrillar α-synuclein variants with impaired bold β-structure increase neurotoxicity in Parkinson's disease models. EMBO J 28(20):3256-68


• Lee D, Walter KFA, Brückner AK, Hilty C, Becker S, Griesinger C (2008) Bilayer in small bicelles revealed by lipid-protein interactions using NMR spectroscopy, J Am Chem Soc 130:13822-3


• Lange O, Lakomek NA,. Farès C, Schroeder GF, Walter K, Becker S, Meiler J, Grubmueller H, Griesinger C, de Groot BL (2008) Recognition dynamics up to microseconds revealed from an RDC-derived ubiquitin ensemble in solution. Science 320:1471-1475


• Bayrhuber M, Meins T, Habeck M, Becker S, Giller K, Villinger S, Vonrhein C, Griesinger C, Zweckstetter M, Zeth K (2008) Structure of the human voltage-dependent anion channel. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:15370-15375


• Bertoncini C W, Jung YS, Fernandez CO, Hoyer W, Griesinger C Jovin TM, Zweckstetter M (2005) Release of long-range tertiary interactions potentiates aggregation of natively unstructured α-synuclein. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 102:1430-1435


• Sanchez-Pedregal VM, Reese M, Meiler J, Blommers MJJ, Griesinger C, Carlomagno T (2005) The INPHARMA method: Protein-mediated interligand NOEs for pharmacophore mapping. Angewandte Chemie-International Edition 44: 4172-4175