Mark your calendars! On May 10th at 10a.m. in room VKL 5.1.31, Benedikt Beckmann will talk about novel methods to study RNA-protein interactions during bacterial infection (click here for the advert). Benedikt is a group leader at the Integrated Research Institute (IRI) for the Life Sciences in Berlin, an institute shared between the Humboldt University Berlin, the Charité University Clinic and the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine.

His research focuses on RNA-protein interactions in host cells during infection by pathogenic bacteria which he studies by employing classical molecular biology methods in combination with systems biology approaches and bioinformatics. Using Salmonella typhimurium as a model system, he investigates whether bacterial-derived non-coding RNAs and RNA-binding proteins can directly manipulate host cell gene expression on a post-transcriptional level e.g. to manipulate the immune repsponse of the host.

Recently, Bene established a novel methodological approach to generate RNA interactomes by employing organic extraction for the purification of UV cross-linked ribonucleoproteins (PTex). Previous methods relied on oligo-dT oligonucleotides to capture cross-linked RNPs by hybridization to the poly(A)-tail, limiting their applicability to eukaryotic organisms. Furthermore, Bene will talk about a recently developed machine learning-based tool for the de novo prediction of RNA-binding proteins across a wide variety of species (TriPepSVM).