Philipp graduated from the University of Münster with the M.Sc. in Biology in 2011. Since January 2012, he is a PhD student in the IGSDHD program.During the rotation period, he worked on the following projects:

  • Lab of Prof. Dr. Sigrun Korsching, Insitute for Genetics, University of Cologne: “Analysis of guanine nucleotide binding protein ? v expression in zebrafish”
  • Lab of Prof. Dr. Maria Leptin, Insitute for Genetics, University of Cologne: “Expression analysis of fish specific NLRs in zebrafish and their role for the innate immune system”
  • Lab of Prof. Dr. Matthias Hammerschmidt, Institute for Developmental Biology, University of Cologne: “Cutaneous wound healing in adult zebrafish”

Since January 2013, he's been working on his PhD project in the Lab of Dr. Michael Lammers. 

The role of lysine acetylation of Ran in nuclear transport and mitosis

Recent proteome-wide analyses of lysine-acetylation would place this post-translational modification on a similar level with phosphorylation and ubiquitination in quantitative terms and its functional importance. However, how lysine-acetylation regulates protein function on a molecular level and how lysine-acetylation itself is regulated has only been marginally investigated so far. Ran, a small GTPase of the Ras superfamily, is the major regulator of nucleo-cytoplasmic protein-shuttling and was found to be lysine-acetylated at four distinct sites. With an orthogonal N(epsilon)-acetyllysyl-tRNA-synthetase/tRNACUA pair we want to incorporate acetyllysine at the desired positions using the genetic-code expansion concept. This will enable us to study the effect of lysine-acetylation on Ran function using various biochemical and biophysical methods including X-ray crystallography.“