Patrick Cramer

Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences


Primary Section: 21, Biochemistry
Membership Type:
International Member (elected 2020)

Biosketch

Born on February 3, 1969 in Stuttgart. Study of chemistry at the Universities of Stuttgart and Heidelberg. Research student at the University of Bristol (UK) and Cambridge (UK). Diploma in chemistry in 1995 at the University of Heidelberg, doctorate at the University of Heidelberg/EMBL Grenoble (France) in 1998. Predoctoral fellow in Grenoble (France) from 1995 to 1998, postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University (USA) from 1999 to 2001. Tenure-track professor of biochemistry at the University of Munich from 2001 to 2003. Professor of biochemistry at the University of Munich from 2004 to 2014. Director of the Gene Center of the University of Munich (LMU) from 2004 to 2013. Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry since 2014. Patrick Cramer has received several awards, including the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the Otto Warburg Medal, and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Research Interests

Gene transcription is the first step in the expression of our genetic information and is highly regulated during cell differentiation and organism development. We wish to understand how our genome is transcribed and regulated in health and disease. We wish to understand how genes are switched on, and how genes are misregulated in diseases such as cancer. To this end, we combine structural biology with functional genomics and bioinformatics in eukaryotic systems. We determine the three-dimensional structure of large transcription complexes by a combinantion of cryo-electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography, and crosslinking-mass spectrometry methods. The obtained structures are combined with functional data. This led to a first molecular movie of transcription and detailed insights into the mechanisms of transcription initiation from different promoters. We solved structures of the coactivator Mediator, and a chromatin-remodelling factor bound to the nucleosome. We will continue to develop methods and will study the structural basis of transcription regulation in chromatin. We also develop and use functional genomics methods and computational approaches to study genome regulation in living cells. Recent achievements include our development of transient transcriptome sequencing, or TT-seq, that can monitor dynamic changes in enhancer landscapes. We also developed a multi-omics approach to extract kinetic parameters of RNA polymerase initiation frequency, pause duration, and elongation velocity. In the future we will study the mechanisms of enhancer function, differentiation, and RNA metabolism, including transcription-coupled RNA processing. Recently we have also investigated coronavirus replication and its inhibition by antiviral agents, in order to help fight the ongoing pandemic.

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