Research Interests and Accomplishments

Peter Uetz has been an Associate Investigator at the JCVI since 2006. He earned a diploma in neurobiology working with nobel laureate Bert Sakmann at the Max-Planck Institute for Medical Research and subsequently a Ph.D. from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), both in Heidelberg, Germany. After a postdoc with Stanley Fields at the University of Washington, Seattle, he returned to Germany where he became an assistant professor at the Research Center Karlsruhe, a national laboratory in Germany.

The Uetz group is currently working on protein interaction networks and protein function. Uetz highlights three research areas:

Viral protein interaction networks: We have studied the protein interaction networks of human herpesviruses and their interactions with human protein networks. Currently we are expanding this project by comparing interaction networks and their interactions with more extensive screens of human libraries. Recently we have been venturing into bacterial-phage interactions.

Bacterial interaction networks: After having analyzed the protein interaction network of the Syphilis spirochete Treponema pallidum, we are now investigating the networks of other species such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, Francisella tularensis, and E. coli.

Bioinformatics of protein interactions: Although bioinformatics analyses play a major role in all of the aforementioned projects they are pursued in their own right. For example, we have analyzed protein interaction data from other groups and currently establish a database of microbial interactions. The goal of these efforts is a global survey of all protein interactions in bacteria.

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