The SCALE Science Lunch Seminar continues on Wednesday, January 21, 2026, at 12:30 h (s.t.) with a talk by Katja Luck — Group Leader at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB), Mainz, and Emmy Noether Program Fellow.
Katja Luck will address one of the central challenges in molecular and structural biology: understanding the full diversity of protein–protein interactions. Her work combines computational prediction, systematic benchmarking, and experimental validation to move beyond well-characterized protein complexes and uncover previously inaccessible modes of protein binding.
Abstract
Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) mediate essentially all cellular processes. The structural diversity by which proteins interact with each other is immense. This comprises their dynamics, binding affinities, and conformation. Unfortunately, experimental characterization of structures of protein complexes is slow and often biased hindering our full comprehension of modes of protein binding and the study of physiological and pathological molecular mechanisms. In my talk, I will describe our efforts in understanding how a biased structural repertoire of protein interaction interfaces in the PDB can bias prediction capabilities of tools like AlphaFold. Based on our benchmarking efforts, we developed computational and experimental pipelines to discover novel modes of protein binding involving disordered protein regions, which are underrepresented in the PDB. We furthermore used predicted protein complex structures to characterize uncertain variants in disordered protein regions followed by experimental validation outperforming state-of-the art tools such as AlphaMissense. Finally, I will briefly present on our most recent successes in developing a novel computational approach in collaboration with the Steinegger lab that enables interactome-wide similarity calculation of protein interaction interfaces with the goal to generate a first systematic hierarchy of modes of protein binding.
The SCALE Science Lunch Seminar will take place in hybrid format. We warmly invite you to join us in person at the MPI for Biophysics, where a light lunch and coffee will be provided after the seminar. The talk will also be streamed live via Zoom.
🔗 Katja Luck on LinkedIn
🔗 Open positions & hiring opportunities in the Luck lab
🔗 Zoom link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom.us/j/97193552271?pwd=Q1hMU0IwTzVoUmlpN3o1cjZ5VVlxUT09
We look forward to welcoming you to the next SCALE Science Lunch Seminar.
