Michael Kuhn

Biography

Michael Kuhn This is the homepage of Michael Kuhn (né Müller). I am from Leipzig and/or Dresden and lived in Pasadena, CA, for three years while studying at Caltech. I did my PhD in the lab of Peer Bork at the EMBL Heidelberg, working on integrating protein-chemical interactions with phenotypic data to predict drug targets and to find the molecular basis of side effects. Between 2009 and 2016, I worked as a post doc in the labs of Andreas Beyer (first Biotec, TU Dresden, now University of Cologne), Tony Hyman and Marino Zerial (MPI-CBG). My main topics of research were: the evolutionary analysis of the centrosome, the conservation of tissue-specific gene expression patterns between distant species, and the analysis of large-scale screening data. Since 2016, I have been a staff scientist in the lab of Peer Bork, partially managing the lab and also performing research on the gut micriobiota and the effects of medications on humans. My wife, Christiane Kuhn, and I are happy parents of three children. eMail: michaelmckuhnde Elsewhere: Twitter, bioCS, a blog, Tumblr, Biology StackExchange Scientific Interests How did such a complex organelle like the centrosome evolve? How did functional requirements and components change over time? What can we learn from the ever-increasing number of tissue expresison samples? This line of research can allow us to gain knowledge about model and non-model species, for example for transcriptome annotation or for studying the fate of gene duplication products. How to best analyse a massive RNAi screen (6000 genes by 1000 features)? What are the hidden connections between pathways that have been captured by such a screen? I am (still) interested in finding the biomolecular basis of diseases and side effects on the level of protein-protein interactions. Can we pinpoint known side effects to target proteins? Can we benefit from a global view on drug-target interactions? Underlying tools that I built together with others are: STITCH, SIDER, and MATADOR. Scientific Vita An affair with chemistry in high school led me twice to the International Chemistry Olympiad. However, I learned from hands-on experience in organic chemistry labs that I did not want to pursue a wet-lab career. Therefore I decided to study computer science at Caltech, where it was also possible to put an emphasis on biochemistry. Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) provided me with the opportunity to work in David Baker's lab in Seattle. During a year-long study term in Dresden, I worked on automatically analyzing single molecule force spectroscopy spectra with Daniel Müller. Later, I worked in Michael Schroeder's lab on protein-protein interfaces, again with SURF funding. I received my PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Heidelberg with summa cum laude after research in the lab of Peer Bork at the EMBL in Heidelberg. The topic of my PhD thesis was: "Integrating chemical and protein interactions: From interaction networks to human phenotypes."

Research Interest

Previous and current research The group currently works on three different spatial scales, but with common underlying methodological frameworks: genes, proteins and small molecules; molecular and cellular networks; microbial communities. We usually work in new or emerging research areas and balance methodological work with biological discoveries. Past frontier research projects include the participation in the Human Genome Project (Lander et al., Nature 2001), foundational work on the study protein interaction networks (von Mering et al., Nature 2002) and comparative metagenomics (Tringe et al., Science 2005), and exploration of drug-target interactions using global human “readouts” such as side effects (Campillos et al., Science 2008)