Start of funding 01.07.2023

Functionalization of bacterial proteomes with quantitative mass-spectrometry

Dr. Christina Ludwig
Technische Universität München
BayBioMS

Prof. Dr. Terence Hwa
University of California, San Diego
Department of Physics, M/C 0374



Over the last decades, molecular biological experiments played a pivotal role in the investigation of gene regulation and molecular functions of proteins. This endeavor has led to an extensive catalog of sub-systems’ molecular activities in well-studied model organisms. Despite this wealth of information, the simplified approach of adding up individual components is failing to predict an organism's phenotype in response to genetic or external perturbations. Nowadays, omics technologies like proteomics, provide a global perspective about the less-understood interplay of sub-systems. Currently, we employ mass-spectrometry-based proteomics to gain insights into the global behavior of (almost) all Escherichia coli proteins in response to a large number of diverse perturbations. In the course of the BaCaTec project, we and specialists from our partner laboratory (Prof. Hwa) at the University of California at San Diego plan to investigate the value of such high-throughput quantitative proteomics data for theoretical cell modeling. Our ultimate goal is to draft a complete functional landscape for bacterial proteomes and to develop a model that can predict global adaptation responses.