PEOPLE

Markus comes from Italy and is Director of the Institute for Biochemistry at the Charité and leader of the Biochemistry and Systems Biology of Metabolism Group. He is known for his discoveries regarding the coordination of dynamics within the cellular metabolic network and the development of analytical methods to tackle complex biological questions. In particular, results obtained by Markus's research group have provided fundamental insights into central carbon and amino acid metabolism, e.g. the evolutionary origion of carbohydrate metabolism, the metabolic oxidative stress response or the application of self-establishing yeast communities to study nutrient sharing.

Alejandra is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Colombia. Her research focuses on studying bacterial-fungal interactions: Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Candida albicans pathogenicity during polymicrobial infection of Galleria mellonella larvae.

Alexandra is the group's project manager and she comes from Germany. She obtained her PhD in Microbiology from the University of Würzburg, Germany. Alexandra gathered work experience in Germany, USA, Canada, and Qatar.

Austin is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from the USA. He conducted his doctoral work at the University of Würzburg, where he studied the regulation of carbon utilization in the pathogenic yeast Candida albicans. His current work focuses on understanding mechanisms of inherent and induced antifungal resistance and tolerance in C. albicans.

Ben is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from the USA. He's also a visiting scientist in Jurg Bahler's lab at University College London. He's interested in metabolic heterogeneity in yeast and in yeast evolution.

Fatma is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from France.

Federica is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Italy. She is interested in microbial communities and molecular responses to environmental change. At Charité she is also very much involved with teaching biochemistry to medical students.

Johannes is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Austria. His research focuses on metabolic principles and adaptations in microbes, and their potential in limiting microbial growth. His work has a strong methodological focus, and he employs mass-spectrometry-based quantification of metabolites and proteins coupled with phenotypic screens. Beyond microbes, he works on biomarker discovery for infectious diseases from human plasma and their translation into clinical assays. Before joining Charité, he studied molecular biology at the University of Vienna, followed by a PhD in microbial metabolism at ETH Zürich.

Julia is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. She's using large-scale proteomics to study aneuploidy in yeasts. Before coming to Charité, she did her PhD in structural virology with Stephen Graham at the University of Cambridge, UK, studying protein-protein interactions between viruses and host cells.

Lisa is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. She completed her PhD at Columbia University, where she investigated how environmental stimuli influence the respiratory and metabolic balance and biofilm formation of the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Lisa joined the Ralser lab in 2020 to explore how metabolic plasticity advances antimicrobial tolerance in critical bacterial pathogens. Lisa is fascinated by the metabolic diversity in microbes and how microbes communicate through metabolic cooperation. In collaboration with Craig MacLean's and Rachel Wheatley's groups at Oxford University, Lisa investigates cross-species interactions of bacterial-fungal co-infections and their contribution to antimicrobial resistance.

Ludwig is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. He studied biochemistry at MLU Halle-Wittenberg, followed by a doctorate at Technische Universität Berlin with Juri Rappsilber, where he contributed to technical developments of crosslinking and mass spectrometry. He joined the Ralser and Demichev labs in 2022, working on novel proteomics methods aiming at higher speed/sensitivity/versatility (e.g. glycoproteomics/clinical and microbial proteomics).

Luise is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. She completed her PhD in computational biology at Universität Köln. She is interested in understanding complex cellular networks — how their components interact, coordinate, and are regulated within cells and organisms. Her current research focuses on protein covariation, phenotypic changes in the context of cellular network structure, and allele-specific patterns of protein expression.

Mike is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from the UK. He gained his PhD from the University of Birmingham. Interested in molecular biology, his main focus is on manipulating E. coli to produce industrially relevant products from sustainable sources.

Nir is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Israel.

Nooshin is a computational biology scientist and comes from Iran. She did her PhD in bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, Germany.

Oliver is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. He did his doctoral degree at the FU Berlin focusing on protein-based molecular dynamics simulations, clustering and docking. He is currently working as a data scientist and bioinformatician on several yeast proteomic and clinical plasma proteomic datasets.

Shaon is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Japan. He acquired his BSc and MSc in pharmacology and therapeutics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has a PhD in biology and computation from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany. Shaon works on machine learning and fast proteomics analyses in the realm of drug discovery.

Steffen is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. He's excited about metabolism. His main focus is to implement synthetic metabolism, aiming at engineering and optimizing microbes for bioproduction from sustainable carbon sources.

Wenxi is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from China. He completed his PhD at the University of Amsterdam, where his research focused on the de novo acquisition of antibiotic resistance. Currently, he is working on Candida albicans drug tolerance and adaptive evolution, utilizing functional genomics and proteomics to investigate the interplay between cellular metabolism and resistance mechanisms as part of the ERC Synergy project "Fungal Tolerance".

Ziyue is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from China. She obtained her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she focused on advancing mass-spectrometry–based identification and quantification of biomarkers for human disease stratification and prognostics. She is currently continuing her work on proteome abundance and human health–related questions, focusing on improving standardization in MS-based absolute quantification and on using human proteomes to describe different health states.

Torsten is a researcher and comes from Germany. He is an experienced biochemist who's worked for many years in both academia and the biotechnology industry. He did his PhD in biochemistry at Technische Universität Berlin.

Alexis is a PhD student and comes from Panama. Before he joined the Ralser lab in 2021 he did his MSc in biotechnology at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

Álvaro is a PhD student and comes from Spain. He obtained his BSc in biotechnology from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, and his MSc in bioinformatics from Hasselt University, Belgium. His current work as a computational biologist focuses on the use of quantitative proteomics to investigate the functional non-redundancy of tRNA genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Amelia is a PhD student and comes from Chile. She has a background in molecular biotechnology engineering from Universidad de Chile. She completed an internship at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, working on enzyme engineering for formatotrophy. Her current focus is on developing an in vivo platform for enzyme evolution.

Boris is a PhD student and comes from Germany. He is excited about studying proteoforms and proteomics data pre-processing. With a Bachelor's degree in biosciences and a Master's degree in bioinformatics he is now focussing on systems biology research.

Clemens is a PhD student and trained bioinformatician from Germany, specializing in data-driven analysis of plasma proteome studies. His work focuses on infectious diseases such as malaria, various neglected tropical diseases, and COVID-19, as well as large-scale cohort studies. Before joining the Ralser Lab, he developed AI-powered image analysis workflows and modeled binding processes in chromatography devices at Sartorius Stedim Biotech.

Dominik is a PhD student and comes from Germany. He is interested in the analysis of plasma proteomics samples. He is a trained lab technician and studied biotechnology at TU Berlin. He joined the Ralser group after working for Sartorius.

Ehsan is a PhD student and comes from Iran. He completed his Master's degree in bioengineering with a focus on constraint-based genome-scale metabolic modeling. His current research interests include engineering bacterial metabolism to produce value-added chemicals by applying growth-coupled bioproduction strategies.

Jan is a PhD student and comes from Germany. In the last few years, his most enjoyable and successful scientific experiences have revolved around the engineering of biological systems. He therefore chose to pursue a PhD in Synthetic Biology and work on the engineering of a quinone-dependent methanol dehydrogenase in E. coli to overcome thermodynamic limitations in synthetic methylotrophy. Currently he's working in the Ralser lab as a guest PhD student before transferring to Tobias Erb's lab at the MPI in Marburg in autumn 2022.

Emilija is a PhD student and comes from Serbia. She holds a degree in biochemical engineering and biotechnology, with a focus on microbiology. Her research explores metabolic networks in gut microbial communities and efflux mechanisms in Candida albicans. Utilizing proteomics, her aim is advance understanding of microbial adaptability and interactions.

Lena is a PhD student and comes from Germany. She is excited about engineering the bacterial metabolism to develop solutions for a sustainable and circular bioeconomy. Her current research focuses on developing a synthetic pyruvate auxotrophy in Escherichia coli with a broad application potential.

Fiona is a PhD student and comes from Germany. She joined the Hartl group in March 2024. Her research focuses on the metabolism of fungal pathogens, and how it shapes infection-relevant phenotypes, particularly the susceptibility to clinical antifungals.

Johanna is a PhD student and comes from Germany. She joined the Ralser lab already during her Master's program in biological chemistry at TU Berlin. She is using proteomics to study aging in yeast models.

Li is a PhD student and comes from China. She is working on developing high-throughput lipid metabolomics and proteomics methods.

Lingyi is a PhD student and comes from China. She is a chemist by training and is currently working on advancing early diagnosis of microbial infections using a mass-spectrometry-based biomarker panel.

Lucas is a PhD student and comes from Germany. He studied biochemistry at Julius-Maximilian-Universität Würzburg and Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on teaching bacteria to efficiently convert sustainable one-carbon substrates into useful products.

Mariella is a PhD student and comes from Germany.

Natalie is a PhD student and comes from Germany. She studied biochemistry at Universität Köln and performed internships/Master's thesis at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and in London. She is currently investigating the yeast metabolome as part of her doctoral research.

Nina is a PhD student and comes from Germany. She obtained her BSc and MSc in biochemistry from Universität Köln. Her current research focuses on how genetic diversity in microbes shapes their metabolic adaptability to environmental changes, using the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa as a model.

Rahma is a PhD student and comes from Norway. She is interested in exploring microbial interactions and the chemical dialogues that drive metabolic adaptation.

Roza is a PhD student and comes from Turkey. Before starting her PhD here, she earned an MSc in molecular medicine from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Roza is currently working on cancer diagnostics and therapeutics.

Sebastian is a PhD student and comes from Germany. Before joining our lab he studied biochemistry at TU Berlin. He is interested in plasma proteomics and chronobiology and works on identifying protein biomarkers in human plasma samples to characterize chronotypes.

Tong is a PhD student and comes from China. He is interested in exploring biological reactions and carbon fixation pathways.

Yating is a PhD student and comes from China. She is working on synthetic fundamental metabolism, aiming at engineering pentose synergic utilization.

Andrea is a technical assistant and comes from Germany.

Anja is an engineer and comes from Germany. She is responsible for mass spectrometers and programming tools to make "proteomics life" easier.

Christiane is a technical assistant and comes from Germany. She's been working in biochemistry for many years and you can still amaze her. Besides technical help at the lab, she also helps newcomers with organizational issues.

Daniela is a technical assistant and comes from Germany. She's been working at the Institute of Biochemistry at the Charité since 1996. Daniela is in charge of sample management, sorting, and preparation for mass spectrometry. She helps keeping the lab organized and always has an open ear for everyone.

Lisa is a technical assistant and comes from Germany.