1) Name – Title of the research project in CCHD
Giulio Superti-Furga - Physical and functional maps of innate immunity processes
2) Coordinates of the Faculty Member
CeMM – Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Lazarettgasse 19/3, A-1090 Vienna; Tel +43 1 40160 70011; Fax +43 1 40160 970000;
eMail: gsuperti@cemm.oeaw.ac.at
3) Keywords
Innate Immunity – nucleic acid recognition – cytokine – signal transduction
4) Research interest of the Faculty Member
Giulio Superti-Furga is Principal Investigator. He is an established scientist working on kinases, proteomics and systems biology. In both fields he has both seminal and recent papers. His papers are the most widely cited papers in the world on the subject of the “proteome”. Recently he has developed technologies that allow the profiling of compounds as a tool to be integrated with systems biology approaches (see commentary in Nature and review in Nature Chemical Biology). He has obtained professional training and ample experience, including industrial experience, on the managing of complex multidisciplinary projects. Successful recent grants on the subject include the Gen-AU (Genome Austria) DRAGON (Drug Activity be Genomics Networks) and PLACEBO (Platform Austria for Chemical Biology).
5) Collaborations within CCHD
Collaboration with Martin Bilban (Oswald Wagner) on transcriptional profiling using microarrays and on the characterization of heme oxygenase 1 by interaction proteomics; collaboration with Philipp Starkl (Erika Jensen-Jarolim) on the identification of allergen receptors by proteomics;
6) Collaborating research groups where PhD Students can perform their research stay
Dr. Jonathan Kagan, Children’s Hospital Boston, USA
7) Know-how and infrastructure of the research group
The projects in the Superti-Furga lab are organized in teams across disciplines, creating an interdisciplinary scientific environment with approaches combining expertise from different scientific areas as mass spectrometry, immunity, chemistry, physics, medicine, cell biology and biochemistry, embedded in the infrastructure of the highly competitive director’s laboratory at the Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Science (CeMM-OEAW), located at the Vienna Competence Center.
Superti-Furga and his team’s expertise in proteomics is witnessed by two studies that contributed in a decisive way our current understanding of the organization of eukaryotic proteomes. In the first landmark study published as two articles in Nature (2002 and 2006), his team, in collaboration with the EMBL, reported on the characterization of hundreds of protein complexes in yeast, using affinity purification of the endogenous complexes and mass spectrometric/bioinformatic analysis. Most importantly, it was possible to uncover higher-level organisation principles, such as modularity. This work is to date, with about 2000 citations, the most highly cited papers on “proteome” world-wide (http://scholar.google.at/) and still one of the top three all time biology papers as ranked by the Faculty of 1000.
The functional proteomics expertise acquired at Cellzome Inc. and at the EMBL by Superti-Furga is complemented by Keiryn Bennett from MDS Proteomics Inc., a world-renowned mass spectrometrist with 10 years of experience in protein identification, leading a dedicated mass spectrometry team with 5 state-of-the-art machines. The laboratory harbours a team of world experts in TAP from mammalian cells and is fully equipped for all molecular biological and biochemical experiments. All cell culture experiments can be performed in the present facility, including retroviral infections and FACS analysis. For bioinformatics and network analysis, a team of IT- and bioinformatics’ experts is centred around J. Colinge, the head of CeMM’s bioinformatics unit, that will assist in the analysis of mass spectrometry data.
