Katja Luck

Katja Luck is an Emmy Noether group leader at the Institute of Molecular Biology where she leads the Integrative Systems Biology lab since 2020. Prior to her group leader position she performed her postdoctoral research in the lab of Prof. Marc Vidal at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston where she led a major screening effort to generate the first reference human protein interactome using yeast two-hybrid as the primary screening system. During her doctoral work in the lab of Dr. Gilles Travé at the Institute of Biotechnology (IREBS) in Strasbourg she used structural bioinformatics and high throughput screening approaches to study protein interaction specificities of the PDZ domain family.

The Luck lab develops and applies scalable computational and experimental approaches to annotate protein-protein interactions (PPI) with interface structures and to use protein complex structure data to decipher molecular mechanisms driving physiological and pathological cellular functions. We integrate in our workflows AlphaFold as well as other published or in-house software to predict protein complex structures and employ site-directed mutagenesis and PPI affinity quantification in 96 well format to validate predicted novel interface types. We develop integrative structural proteomics approaches to map PPI interfaces and establish routines for the computation of PPI interface similarity to build a first systematic resource of PPI interface types. We integrate structurally resolved PPI network data with gene expression and disease mutation data to derive predictions about tissue-specific PPIs and their perturbation driving tissue-specific genetic diseases. In collaboration, we use our methods to study cellular processes such as RNA splicing, nuclear proteostasis, and chromatin remodelling.