Juri Rappsilber PhD

Juri Rappsilber studied chemistry at the Institute of Technology, Berlin (Germany), Strathclyde University, Glasgow (UK) and with Tom Rapoport, Harvard Medical School, Boston (USA). In 2001, he earned his Ph.D. jointly from EMBL Heidelberg and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt (Germany) working in the laboratory of Matthias Mann on the mass spectrometric analysis of protein complexes. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense before starting his independent career as a group leader at IFOM, Milan (Italy) in 2003. In 2006, Juri Rappsilber joined the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology in the Institute of Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh. In 2009, Juri Rappsilber became a Senior Research Fellow of the Wellcome Trust, in 2010 he was appointed Professor of Proteomics in Edinburgh and in 2011 Professor of Bioanalytics in Berlin.

Juri Rappsilber is a pioneer in developing methods for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of proteins in complex mixtures by mass spectrometry, with special emphasis on protein-nucleic acid (RNA and DNA) and protein-protein interactions. Proteins and their interactions are at the heart of most biological processes and if erroneous cause diseases such as cancer or neurodegenerative diseases. Juri Rappsilber’s interests are focused on combining chemistry and informatics with biological mass spectrometry to expand the frontiers of our current knowledge on how cells work.

Juri Rappsilber’s lab is working on novel methods for identifying and quantifying the interactions and the accurate sites of interaction of proteins with other proteins, DNA and RNA. This makes use of chemical cross-linking to preserve non-covalent interactions for their analysis by mass spectrometry and novel computer algorithms to automatically interpret the mass spectrometric data.

Another goal of the lab’s research is the development and application of biochemical and computational methods in conjunction with mass spectrometry to study chromatin-associated processes in health and disease.