Protein Chemistry (M.Sc.)

Protein Chemistry (Master)

BioEU Master of Science Programmes

Are you interested to learn about the fascinating complexity of living organisms, from single molecules to global ecosystems? Would you like to become familiar with cell biology, biochemistry, neurobiology, molecular genetics, evolution, ecology, bioinformatics, metabolomics or proteomics, would you like to understand behavior, neuron function, mechanisms of microbial infection, parasiolgy, tumor development or tissue regeneration?

The eight BioEU Master of Science Programmes offer you tailor-made -curricula according to your personal interests. Selecting a particular BioEU Master programme will allow you to become a specialist in your chosen field of interest, and, during the master programme, you will be involved in ongoing projects in leading edge research groups either at the university of Würzburg or partner universities. Furthermore, you may directly continue your research activities in a subsequent doctoral programme in a leading edge environment.

Programme Profile: Protein Chemistry

The programme deals with fundamentals in structural biology and biochemistry with special focus on protein chemistry and biophysical methods for high resolution analytics. Fundamentals in thermodynamics, reaction kinetics and theoretic aspects of molecular interactions are discussed. The students get familiar with biophysical methods allowing to delineate both the structure of single cells “down” to single molecules. Examples include electromanipulation and dielectrical spectroscopy of cells, electrokinetic techniques, protein folding, single molecule fluorescence methodology, high resolution as well as dynamic microscopy. Further topics are current approaches in bioinformatics including the analysis of genomes and sequences, protein domains and protein families, further large-scale data analysis (e.g. next generation sequences, proteomics data), the analysis of different functional RNAs (e.g. miRNAs, lncRNAs). Aspects of computational systems biology include functional genomics, dynamics of the transcriptome, of metabolism and metabolic networks as well as regulatory networks.

The two major topics are composed of two theory modules as well as a practical course unit each. Further research training is provided in a selected field of interest, and the students are actively involved in ongoing research projects and learn to independently plan and perform both theoretical and experimental work and finally, to summarize and discuss the results obtained in the thesis.

Objectives and Learning Outcomes

The students understand the principles of biophysics and biochemistry including structural biology. They also become familiar with fundamental methods in biophysics and get an idea to apply these in various experimental settings. This enables the students to get deeper into the field by reading current scientific literature, by acquiring sufficient quantitative understanding of biophysical mechanisms. They further understand recent results in systems biology and are able to work on related research projects.

Further informations to this study programme