Max-Planck-Insti­tute of Bio­chem­istry, dept. Cel­lu­lar and Molecu­lar Biophysics

Our research is based on the devel­op­ment and applic­a­tion of nov­el bio­phys­ic­al meth­ods to elu­cid­ate dynam­ic pro­cesses in bio­lo­gic­al sys­tems with unpre­ced­en­ted pre­ci­sion. Hav­ing suc­cess­fully applied our meth­ods to increas­ingly com­plex bio­lo­gic­al sys­tems in recent years, we have shif­ted our ambi­tion to a massive sim­pli­fic­a­tion of the sys­tems under invest­ig­a­tion. We strongly believe that a uni­ver­sal and quant­it­at­ive under­stand­ing of a bio­lo­gic­al sys­tem is only pos­sible if all import­ant vari­ables, espe­cially all func­tion­al molecules, are known and quan­ti­fi­able. For this reas­on, we have ini­ti­ated our new focus ​“Bot­tom-up Syn­thet­ic Bio­logy”, in which we aim to assemble sys­tems of fun­da­ment­al bio­lo­gic­al rel­ev­ance from func­tion­al build­ing blocks.