Main Focus
Structure and function of membrane proteins and membrane protein complexes, CryoEM, X-ray crystallography, membrane biochemistry, bioenergetics
Curriculum Vitae
Werner Kühlbrandt studied chemistry and crystallography at the Free University Berlin, and biochemistry and biophysics at King’s College London. In 1981 he obtained his PhD with Nigel Unwin at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, investigating the structure of two-dimensional ribosome crystals by electron microscopy. As a postdoc, he turned to structural studies of membrane proteins, first at the ETH Zürich, and then at Imperial College London. In 1988 he became a research group leader at EMBL Heidelberg, Germany, where he determined the high-resolution structure of the plant light-harvesting complex LHC-II by cryoEM. Since 1997 he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, where his department of Structural Biology studies large membrane protein complexes by single-particle cryoEM, electron cryo-tomography and x-ray crystallography.