Metabolism coordinates the conversion of available nutrients toward energy, biosynthetic intermediates, and signaling molecules to mediate cellular functions. Dysregulation of metabolic pathways, i.e. genetic perturbation, i.e. via environmental stress and/or inflammatory signaling, contributes to many metabolic diseases, including cancer, inflammation, and brain disorders.
The overall theme of our research is to characterize metabolic heterogeneity and interconnectivity of cells and pathogens to better understand metabolism in driving cell function, focusing on metabolic flux, mass spectrometry, and engineering approaches. We expect that our research identifies metabolic vulnerabilities in inflammatory diseases, which can be influenced through targeted therapies.
The metabolism of bacteria and archaea is directly linked to the interaction of the organism with its environment. The understanding of cellular processes is still limited today by the insufficient understanding of regulatory mechanisms and the lack of the functional assignment of enzymatic properties. Our aim is to understand and to influence the metabolism of bacteria and archaea by analyzing their metabolism under defined conditions. We address several model organisms relevant in biotechnology, health care or specific environmental conditions.
The immuno-metabolism team investigates cellular and mitochondrial metabolism of immune cells. We are interested in the role of metabolism during inflammation and how metabolism is involved in the immune response of cells of the innate immune system. On the one hand, we study macrophage metabolism during an infection with bacterial pathogens and on the other hand the role of microglia cells during neuro-degeneration. The team has developed a strong expertise in stable-isotope assisted metabolomics and metabolic flux analysis both on a whole cell as well as on a mitochondrial sub-compartment level. We take advantage of our bioinformatics background to develop tailored tools for the analysis of GC/MS based data which we obtain from stable-isotope labeling experiments.
Myeloid cells are a group of innate immune cells, including monocytes, macrophages, granulocytes (neutrophils, basophils, eosinophils) and dendritic cells (DCs). Each of these subsets can be further divided into various functional subtypes depending on the specific tissue environmental cues during physiologic and pathologic conditions. Our group mainly focuses on myeloid cells in the context of tumor development and obesity-associated conditions.
