Thomas Dandekar

Background: MD (Neuropharmacology); Habilitation (Biochemistry);
Teaching, collaborations and students at the University of Heidelberg;

Research Interests: metabolic pathways, protein structure, regulation (including RNA at different levels)

Tools: Biochemistry, sequence/structure/function relationships, Motif-searches, experimental verification, protein structure analysis, the genetic algorithm.

Further scientific interests:
- medical biochemistry,
- biosensors and nanotechnology (not shown on this page, several projects
with the cell biophysics program and students at Heidelberg university),
- aging

How to contact me at the EMBL:

European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Room V102
Meyerhofstraße 1, 69012 Heidelberg, Germany
Phone: +49 6221 387-466
Fax: +49 6221 387-306

Introduction to some research topics:

Analysing Protein structures:
- Potential of genetic algorithms in protein folding and protein
engineering. Dandekar,T. and Argos,P. (1992) Protein Eng. 5,637-645.
- Identifying the tertiary fold of small proteins with different
topologies from sequence and secondary structure using the genetic
algorithm and extended criteria specific for strand regions.

Dandekar,T. and Argos,P. (1996) J. Mol. Biol 256, 645-660.
- Furthermore, here is a concise paper (Journal of Molecular Modelling, July 1997)
on some recent studies, applications and experiments.

Analysing RNA structures:
- Finding the hairpin in the haystack.
Dandekar,T. and Hentze,M.W. (1995) TIGS 11, 45-50.

- If you want to know more on regulatory RNA structures, and how
to analyze them by theoretical and experimental approaches you should read
our book on regulatory RNA

Metabolic and regulatory pathways:
- Differential genome analysis
(with Martijn Huynen and Peer Bork)
for example inferring physical protein interaction from conserved gene pairs
- Metabolic pathway analysis
(with Stefan Schuster and Peer Bork)
Here is a simplified overview on some of the pathways we are interested in.


e-mail: dandekar@embl-heidelberg.de