Harald Schwalbe

Prof. Dr. Harald Schwalbe

Research:

The research in our group is focussed on the development and application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to study biomacromolecules. Our focus is to contritube to a molecular understanding of fundamental mechanism of biomacromolecules. We investigate proteins - soluble proteins and membrane proteins. We investige RNAs and RNA-protein complexes and unusual DNA structures.

Particular emphasis is on time-resolved NMR experiments; we induce protein, DNA- or RNA-folding by light from compounds that are caged in one (of several) conformations by photolabile protecting groups or natural light-absorbing chromophors. Some of these caged molecules are synthesized in the lab. A different way of inducing biomacromolecular folding is by temperature jump; thus we have developed T-jump probes to do these kind of experiments.

We also investigate proteins structures to contribute to rational drug discovery and support our mechanistic studies by chemical synthesis.