Our Team
Group Leader
Dr. Georg Künze
- Master in Biochemistry at Leipzig University
- PhD in Biophysics at Leipzig University
- Postdoc in Computational Biology at Vanderbilt University
Lab Technician
Andrea Schöler
- Diploma in Biotechnology (FH) from Fachhochschule Köthen
- Supports various wetlab projects e.g. engineering of enzymes and protein binders
Postdocs
Dr. Olha Storozhuk
- Engineering and optimization of plastic-degrading enzymes
- Expression and functional characterization of enzymes
- Development of high-throughput screening and scale-up strategies for efficient enzymatic plastic degradation
Dr. Abibe Useini
- Protein crystallography and X-ray structure determination of polyester hydrolase enzymes
- Engineering of miniprotein binders against VEGF and other targets
PhD Students
Norbert Graefe
- Design of plastic-degrading enzymes using machine learning
- Development of a platform for machine learning-assisted directed evolution
- In vitro production and testing of predicted enzyme variants
Paul Kluge
- Structure-based and sequence based-analysis of ligand binding sites in ion channels
- Development of a web platform for the interactive, comparative analysis of ligand binding sites in ion channels
Palina Pliushcheuskaya
- Computational drug design on cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channels
- Molecular dynamics simulations of ion channels
- Prediction of ligand binding sites and binding affinities for membrane proteins
Kaja Schwerin
- Molecular dynamics simulations and molecular modeling on PAR1 G protein-coupled receptors
- Investigation of tethered ligand binding to the PAR1 receptor using modeling and noncanonical amino acid cross-linking
Ivan Ivanikov
- Web development of ion channel database (ICARUS)
- Development of machine learning methods for electrostatic potential prediction
- Application of machine learning methods of molecular dynamics simulations
Jannik Jukiel
- Activity prediction for natural products using bioinformatic tools for the prioritization biosynthetic gene clusters
- Sequence-based comparison of gene clusters and classification into groups of assigned bioactivities
Rajarshi SinhaRoy
- Brownian Dynamics and coarse-grained simulations of lipid nano particles to study their structure and association with blood serum proteins
- Development of Machine Learning methods for molecular dynamics simulations
ZeYu Cheng
- Drug discovery on Proteinase-Activated Receptor 3 (PAR3) with the aid of virtual screening
- Molecular dynamics simulations of PAR receptor oligomerization in order to study the mechanism of allosteric regulation
Laura Pilgram
- Proteome-wide protein structure predictions with AlphaFold
- Protein variant effect prediction using AI tools
- De novo protein design with RFdiffusion
Jonas Gunkel
- Engineering of plastic degrading enzymes for PLA recycling
- Rosetta design of new enzymes
Antonio Sáenz Castillo
- Chemoenzymatic synthesis of lasso peptides targeting the glucagon receptor (GCGR)
- Computational structure prediction and engineering of lasso peptides maturation enzymes
Muhammad Yasir Ateeque
- Development of AlphaFold + NMR methods for protein structure prediction
- Modeling of biomolecular complexes using spin-label NMR data
Master and Bachelor Students
Christian Clauß
Matthias Grohmann
Alexander Tauber
Gabriel Kahnt
Anna Kauschinger
Student Assistants
Richy Kümpfel
Janne Winsemann
Anton Mahnken