Prof. Dr. Marco Hein
MedUni Wien RESEARCHER OF THE MONTH September 2026
A defining feature of eukaryotic cells is their internal organization into various organelles, which create separate compartments for different biochemical processes. For proteins to function properly, they must not only be present in sufficient amounts but also localized to the correct compartment. Marco Hein and colleagues at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco developed a new high-throughput method to map protein localization comprehensively, combining targeted organelle enrichment with sensitive mass spectrometry. This allowed them to assign roughly 7,600 proteins to one of 20 cellular compartments, creating a detailed localization map. Notably, the method can also capture dynamic changes in protein localization. Applying it to cells infected with the human coronavirus OC43, the team found that many proteins shifted their subcellular location during infection without significant changes in overall abundance, suggesting re-localization as an alternative way to regulate protein activity. The study thus provides both a rich resource on subcellular protein localization and a new approach for visualizing global changes in cellular organization.
Selected Literature
- Hein MY*#, Peng D*#, Todorova V*, McCarthy F*, Kim K*, Liu C*, Savy L, Januel C, Baltazar-Nunez R, Sekhar M, Vaid S, Bax S, Vangipuram M, Burgess J, Njoya L, Wang E, Ivanov IE, Byrum JR, Pradeep S, Gonzalez CG, Aniseia Y, Creery JS, McMorrow AH, Sunshine S, Yeung-Levy S, DeFelice BC, Mehta SB, Itzhak DN, Elias JE#, Leonetti MD#. “Global organelle profiling reveals subcellular localization and remodeling at proteome scale. Cell. 2025 Feb 20;188(4):1137-1155.e20. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.11.028
* first authors # corresponding authors