Dr. Jörg D. Hoheisel

Protein profile of urine samples of cancer patients and healthy donors. Samples are depicted as squares that are coloured according to disease-state and gender; black spots represent proteins that contribute to the diagnosis. As can be seen from the plot, discrimination between cancer and healthy is nearly as good as discrimination between men and women.

Research at the Division of Functional Genome Analysis aims at the development and immediate application of new technologies for an analysis, assessment and description of both the realisation and regulation of cellular function from genetic information. Analyses on tumour material are at the centre of attention, with a particular emphasis on pancreatic cancer. Parallel studies at a global level are under way, for example, on the epigenetic modulation of gene promoters, variations in transcription factor binding, changes of transcript levels of coding and non-coding RNAs, differences in the actual protein expression and the occurrence and ratio of protein isoforms as well as the intensity of protein interactions. From the resulting data, we aim at an understanding of cellular regulation and its biological consequences. In combination with clinical facts, the knowledge is used for the creation of means of reliable, possibly early and non-invasive diagnosis, accurate prognosis and patient stratification, monitoring of treatment results and the establishment of new therapeutic approaches.

As a consequence of the immense amount of information available at the level of nucleic acids, developments and applications in the field of affinity-based analysis of the proteome have become a focus technically, since technologies and analysis processes in this area are still inadequate for many, in particular biomedical purposes.

A more recent line of work aims at an in vitro implementation of complex biological processes. Motivation is a utilisation in the area of Synthetic Biology for the production of molecules and the establishment of artificial molecular systems. Cell-free biosynthetic production will be critical for many biotechnological and pharmacochemical challenges ahead. Artificial experimental systems, on the other hand, will complement current Systems Biology, evaluating biological models experimentally. Similar to physics, insight into cellular functioning will be gained by an iterative processing of information by experimental and theoretical systems biology. Eventually, this may lead to the establishment of a fully synthetic self-replicating system and – in the long run – an archetypical model of a cell.

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