Hosted by the School of Biochemistry

Host: Christiane Berger-Schaffitzel

The laboratory studies macromolecular complexes with enzymatic function involved in RNA metabolism and in the regulation of gene expression. Many complexes in the research portfolio contain both proteins and RNA. RNA executes incredibly many roles in eukaryotic cells, thanks to its low-diversity chemical composition, which allows the polymer to change structure depending on the environment, binding partners and cofactors. Thus, the integrative structural biology (ISB) approach is ideal to understand how RNA molecules moonlight between different, tightly regulated functions.

In particular the group is active in the biological areas of:

• RNA editing, modification and metabolism
• Chromatin modifications
• Regulation of protein function in cancer and infections

The research group also contributes new methodologies to ISB. For example, the Carlomagno group has pioneered solid-state NMR spectroscopy as an irreplaceable tool to solve structures of RNA in flexible RNP complexes, which are not suitable for XRS and EM studies.