SynCell-nExUs Supervisors

Frauke Gräter is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz and is heading the department Biomolecular Mechanics. Previous stations included a postdoc at Columbia University in New York and group leader positions in Shanghai and Heidelberg, with a joint appointment as professor at Heidelberg University. Frauke investigates how biomolecular systems dynamically respond to external stimuli. Her group uses and advances molecular simulations and machine learning in combination with biophysical experiments. Among others, she has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant and is an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

”Structural flexibility is inherent to biomolecular function, but not yet considered in standard protein design tools. We recently developed deep generative models to design and assess de novo proteins with target flexibility. This project will establish flexibility as a design principle for functional proteins. Candidates interested in AI method development will focus on extending our state-of-the-art framework to anisotropic fluctuations and atomic resolution. Application-focused candidates will aim at designing key metabolic enzymes by tailoring functional flexibility, or disordered domains to regulate condensate formation. The project is tightly knit with our group’s theoretical & experimental branches, and SynCell’s synthetic cell efforts.”

For more information, visit the Gräter’s website