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Students are sitting at the Martin Schmeisser Square in the summer © Roland Baege​/​TU Dortmund
Funding from European Research Council

Dr. Malte Gersch Awarded ERC Consolidator Grant

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Portraitfoto © Bettina Engel-Albustin
The European Research Council will support Dr. Malte Gersch with around €2 million.
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Dr. Malte Gersch, a chemical biologist at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at TU Dortmund University, one of its coveted ERC Consolidator Grants. In his “UbiPRO” project, he wants to develop novel biochemical tools to characterize proteins in the cell’s ubiquitin signaling system that are so far unknown. The ERC will support Dr. Gersch with around €2 million over five years. In the current round, over 3,000 researchers throughout Europe applied for an ERC Consolidator Grant, which is intended for excellent researchers with innovative and promising ideas. The funding rate was eleven percent.

Dr. Malte Gersch’s research focuses on biochemical processes in intracellular communication, where the protein ubiquitin marks other proteins to control their degradation, transport or activity – rather like a “molecular Post-it”. In the new UbiPRO project, he will study the catalytic activities of special enzymes called deubiquitinases (DUBs). For this purpose, Gersch will develop a chemoproteomic platform for analyzing the activity of these enzymes. With the help of novel, chemically modified ubiquitin probes, he will replicate complex polyubiquitin structures and decipher the mechanisms by which DUBs recognize and process specific signals. The project combines approaches from protein chemistry, chemoproteomics and structural biology, and aims to gain new insights into the regulation of the ubiquitin system – potentially leading to a better understanding of disease mechanisms and the development of therapeutic strategies.

About Dr. Malte Gersch

Dr. Malte Gersch studied chemistry and biochemistry at LMU Munich. A research stay at Stanford University School of Medicine awakened his interest in chemical biology, and he subsequently completed his doctoral degree under the supervision of Professor Stephan Sieber at the Technical University of Munich, where he conducted research on the function and inhibition of the bacterial proteasome ClpP. During his postdoctoral stay at Professor David Komander’s lab in Cambridge, UK, he focused on the regulation and structure of human deubiquitinases. He moved to Dortmund at the end of 2018, where he heads an Emmy Noether independent junior research group at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology of TU Dortmund University and works at the Chemical Genomics Center (CGC) at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology. Dr. Malte Gersch has received numerous awards for his research, including the Hans Fischer Prize, the Friedrich Weygand Prize, the Emil Erlenmeyer Medal and the ORCHEM Prize.

About the ERC Consolidator Grant

With the ERC Consolidator Grant, the European Research Council supports excellent researchers who have developed an exceptional scientific profile within twelve years of completing their doctoral degree. This individual funding gives grant holders the opportunity to perform particularly innovative and pioneering work in the natural sciences.

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