Junior Research Group "Computational Proteomics"

We are an interdisciplinary junior research group at Freie Universität Berlin developing methods for analyzing biological systems, ultimately allowing for new clinical diagnostics tools.

Proteomics is a relatively young discipline dealing with the complicated protein mixture in biological systems, for example the human body. Changes in the concentration of some protein species can often be directly linked to  diseases, such as cancer. The Computational Proteomics Group develops new algorithms capable of identifying changes in the very high dimensional proteome data we are getting from clinical partners. In particular, we are interested in tiny signals that are usually hidden in the noisy part of the data and not detectable by current approaches. Nevertheless, these very small signals are crucial for reliable classification of biological samples.

Detected disease-specific fingerprints are further analyzed for identifying their molecular causes. We are mainly interested in the kinetic changes inside the system that lead to the observed changes in protein concentration; changes in kinetics are often caused by changes in the underlying proteases activity.

For all our methods we put special emphasis on the applicability in clinical areas, i.e., the algorithms are designed to be simple, fast and reliable, with particular respect to sensitivity and specificity sufficient for clinical requirements.