Welcome to the Research Group of Sabine Schneider!

Nucleic acids are more than carrier of the genetic information (DNA), and not only act merely as intermediate infrastructural component (rRNA, tRNA) and messenger (mRNA) between genes and proteins. During the last decades, they have proved to be tremendously versatile molecules. They play a pivotal role in numerous cellular key processes, such as metabolite sensing, catalytic regulation of gene expression, development and differentiation and immunity. Thus, their functions are almost as multifaceted, as those of proteins and they acquire intricate three-dimensional structures, thanks to which they carry out these tasks.

We are interested in the structure-function relationship of nucleic acids, how they interact and modulate protein funtion and recognize small molecules, which we are probing using chemical biology, biochemistry, massspectrometry and X-ray crystallography. Moreover we are interested in the chemical and epigenetic modification landscape of small non-coding RNAs and their impact on gene regulation and their interaction network, which we are investigating by massspectrometry and next generation sequencing methods.

Fig. 1 Molecular recognition of crRNA by its Cas-endonuclease.