F. Ulrich Hartl, MD, known for his discoveries of the fundamental mechanisms of protein folding, will present a Discovery Lecture Thursday, Oct. 1.
His presentation, “Molecular Chaperones in Protein Folding and Proteome Health,” begins at 4 p.m. in 202 Light Hall on the Vanderbilt Health Main Campus.
Hartl is Director of the Department of Cellular Biochemistry at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich-Martinsried, Germany.
Proteins — the molecules that carry out nearly all biological reactions in our cells — are synthesized as chains of amino acid building blocks and must “fold” into their biologically active, three-dimensional structures. Hartl, with Arthur Horwich, MD, of Yale School of Medicine, discovered “molecular chaperones,” a class of proteins that help other proteins fold efficiently. Chaperones also monitor and help repair proteins to maintain a healthy proteome.
Aging-related declines in chaperone function are associated with toxic protein aggregation in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s. Discovering ways to prevent chaperone decline could point to new treatments for these neurodegenerative diseases.
Hartl received his MD from Heidelberg University in Germany and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Munich. He was a tenured faculty member of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and an associate investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1994 to 1997 before returning to Munich as a Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry.
Hartl has received numerous awards for his research, including the 2011 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Hartl’s lecture is sponsored by the Department of Biochemistry, Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology and Vanderbilt Center for Structural Biology.
