Mechanochemistry of Inflammation

Our Research

Our research is driven by curiosity. We aim to understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying the self-organization of living matter. To that end, our computational lab combines concepts from theoretical physics and chemistry to elucidate how cells organize thousands of different biomolecules in the nucleus through a combination of molecular interactions, mechanical forces, and energy consumption. 

More specifically, we investigate how chemical and mechanical signals control the nucleoplasm and genome organization in healthy cells and thereby coordinate vital processes such as gene transcription, splicing, and ribosomal assembly. These processes are often perturbed in pathologies. To improve our understanding of human pathologies, we investigate how cellular signals are hijacked during infection and inflammation. Our vision is to integrate the physical principles of biological organization to understand how cell and tissue homeostasis are affected by the expression of viral proteins during infection, cytokine signaling during inflammation, and restored upon recovery.

Our main research projects are:

1. Innate immunity and inflammation: resource reallocation and optimal control.
2. Active chemical control of phase separation in cells.
3. Active mechanical control of biomolecular condensate and chromatin dynamics.

The research group “Mechanochemistry of Inflammation” is a joint research group of the HZI and the Lower Saxony Center for AI & Causal Methods in Medicine (CAIMed).