Scientific Projects

  The 'Transcriptome' is the total sum of all transcriptional products within a cell. As Transcription is a tightly regulated process, misregulation usually causes a broad variety of diseases. Fixing these misregulated states for the good of mankind is what we mean by 'Therapeutic'. This implies that at the end of the day we want to develop molecules as therapeutical precursors specific for each of those diseases.

Figure 1: Crystal structure of the NF-Y heterotrimer. The NF-YB/C heterodimer (licght and dark grey) forms a histone-fold that can interact with the double stranded DNA (black/orange), but still needs NF-YA (blue) to be locked into place.
Figure 1: Crystal structure of the NF-Y heterotrimer. The NF-YB/C heterodimer (licght and dark grey) forms a histone-fold that can interact with the double stranded DNA (black/orange), but still needs NF-YA (blue) to be locked into place.

As a common scope we focus on direct bimolecular interactions and their modifications. This can either be an inhibition or a stabilization of the complex and thereby activating or de-activating its function. Examples for protein-protein interaction modifications would be the NF-Y complex (see Figure 1) or the beta-catenin oncogene.

  The Nuclear Factor Y (NF-Y) is a hetero trimeric transcription factor that consists of the sub-units A, B and C. The later pre-form a heterodimer that scans the double stranded DNA via its histone fold structure, whereas binding to the sub-unit A (blue in figure 1) locks the trimer into place on CCAAT DNA elements. These DNA promoter regulate various target genes involved in e.g. apoptosis or cancer metabolomics. Therefore, we are interested in modulating the transcriptional outcome of this protein-DNA complex.