"A new tool changes the questions we can ask"

Edward Tate erhält den Klaus-Grohe-Preis der GDCh zusammen mit Nicolas Winssinger (Seite 78). Tate hat chemische Werkzeuge entwickelt, mit denen sich die Lipidierung von Proteinen – eine wichtige Klasse von Proteinmodifikationen – im gesamten Proteom untersuchen lässt. Er entwickelte Hemmstoffe der N-Myristoyltransferase für die Krebsforschung und ist Unternehmensgründer.

How would you explain your research to a child?

Imagine your body is made up of trillions of tiny factories. Inside each factory are lots of little machines called proteins that do all the important jobs. My research is about understanding how these machines work, how they sometimes go wrong in diseases such as cancer, and how we can design even tinier molecules to fix them.

The biggest surprise of my career as a researcher was

how often developing a new tool changes the questions we can ask. Our work on protein lipidation is one example: chemical probes allowed us to study these modifications across the proteome, opening up questions about their roles in disease that were previously difficult to address.

What advice would you give your younger self?

If a question matters and

ServiceAusgezeichnet