Bernd Bukau Receives ERC Advanced Grant

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a highly endowed grant - an ERC Advanced Grant for leading researchers in Europe - to Heidelberg molecular biologist Bernd Bukau. The five-year endowment will fund a research project in which the scientists will study the maturation of proteins in cells. The central question is how a cell can efficiently 'fold' amino acid chains into functional proteins with a three-dimensional structure and assemble them to protein complexes. Prof. Bukau is director of the Centre for Molecular Biology of Heidelberg University (ZMBH) and at the same time does research at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ). Approximately 2.1 million euros are available to fund the research work, which will start in summer 2017. In the ERC-supported research project 'TransFold - Molecular Biology of Nascent Chains: Co-translational Folding and Assembly of Proteins in Eukaryotes' Prof. Bukau and his team are focusing on the process of protein folding. How does the unique three-dimensional structure arise for each protein and how do different proteins find each other to form functional protein complexes? 'In our investigations with bacteria we have shown that the folding and assembly of proteins takes place during synthesis through ribosomes in translation, i.e. co-translationally.