We couldn't resist the trend – so we turned some of our team into action figures!

Warning: extreme levels of coolness, heroic poses, and questionable superpowers ahead.
Which one would you add to your collection?

Happy Easter from all of us at the Institute of Biochemistry!

Here at the Institute of Biochemistry, we research proteins which are essential building blocks of live. They are not just an important supplement in your diet if you want to gain muscles but they also are important for a myriad of other body functions. For example, they enable you to sense light which lets your brain see this text and process it.

But how do specific proteins exactly work? This question is often answered in yearlong academic studies and countless experiments. However, with AI on the horizon, there are now novel methods available to get these answers faster.

In a recent study in our institute, a machine learning tool was tuned to make proteins "talk" about which parts of them are important for the jobs they do. This tool was used to research a bacterial light sensor, a cousin to the light sensors which are used by plants. The insights of this study might one day help us to understand better how plants, an important pillar of our diet, react to sun light. Read here the pre-print.

We congratulate Oliver Eder and Massimo Gregorio Totaro of the Group of Andreas Winkler and the Group of Gustav Oberdorfer for the successful completion of this highly collaborative project and wish good luck for the (potentially) upcoming revision.