Coworkers and Collaborators:

If you can't think of something clever on your own you need to find people to support you. Besides, working in a team is one of the wonderful sides of doing science. I have always had the opportunity to share my ideas with fascinating people.

My present group is shown on the picture below (from left to right):

Christina Ewald, Reto Walser, Randall Watson, Xuan Shao, Svava Wetzel, Harsha Kocherla and Sowmini Kumaran are presently working on their Ph.D. thesis or doing their Postdoc. They are part of projects concerning GPCR fragments (Sowmini, Harsha, Xuan), GPCR mimietics (Reto) or repeat proteins (Christina, Randall and Svava) (see the project page). The picture also shows Simon Jurt, who is the head of the NMR service unit, and Nadja Bross, a technician in the NMR.

My previous coworkers include:

Reto Bader, who was my first PhD student. Being trained in biochemistry and mathematics he used molecular biology, solid-phase peptide synthesis, NMR spectroscopy and other techniques to develop our ideas on membrane-binding of hormones

Mirjam Lerch has carried on his work with much enthusiasm. She has been looking into chimeric peptides of NPY and PP and compared NPY, PYY and PP.

Chao Zou, who did a great job in establishing the biochemistry on the GPCR fragments

Alexey Neumoin, who worked on folding and on the first structure of a double-TM GPCR fragment

Jiri Mares who developed a glycolipid system, investigated LPS and studied peptide folding

Many diploma students (Verena Gafner, Margot Mayrhofer, Gaby Rytz, Sandra Lauber, Claudia Fischer and Karin Weber), project students (Barbara Christen) and a postdoc (Sivakami Chandrasekaran) have ruined their life while working with me...

The daily work at the spectrometers is supported by the technicians Nadja Bross and Simon Jurt.

Collaborators:

At the campus site I have made many fruitful collaborations with John Robinson from the Organic Chemistry Institute and Andreas Plückthun, Markus Grütter and Milan Vasak from the Biochemistry Institute.

External fruitful collaborations exist with Fred Naider (New York) and Jeff Becker (Tennessee) on the Ste2p GPCR projects, with Jürgen Scherkenbeck (Wuppertal) on insect hormones and with Hans-Robert Kalbitzer (Regensburg) on high pressure studies.

Many projects were done with groups in the Pharmacy department, namely the group of Gerd Folkers, Annette Beck-Sickinger (now in Leipzig) and Hans-Peter Merkle.


I have had the opportunity to work for some time in the powerful lab of Kurt Wüthrich. I have many friends from there. Support on the spectroscopic part is deeply acknowledged from Gerhard Wider. Peter Güntert (now in Frankfurt) has written most of the software I am using and he is always willing to discuss things with me.

I would also like to acknowledge discussing with Marcel Blommers, Wolfgang Jahnke and Cesar Fernandez from Novartis as well as with Hans Senn, Alfred Ross and Werner Klaus from Hoffman LaRoche.