HUPO 4th Annual World Congress
 
HUPO 4th Annual World Congress
Congress Co-Chair

Mathias Mann

Mathias Mann Matthias Mann, a German native, was trained in physics and mathematics and studied with John Fenn for his Ph.D. which he received from Yale University in 1989. After postdoctoral work with Peter Roepstorff in Denmark, he became group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. Since 1998 he has been full professor at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense where he is now the director of the Center for Experimental BioInformatics (CEBI). From July 2005 he will be a director at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, near Munich.

Dr. Mann’s work in mass spectrometry and proteomics stretches back for 20 years, starting with work on the electrospray ionization method and today encompasses a wide spectrum of cell signaling problems which his group approaches with proteomic techniques. He has been elected member of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBO), visiting professor at Harvard Medical School as well as to the Danish Society of Arts and Sciences. He is author or co-author of more than 250 publications and is the recipient of many international prizes.

Summary of work

Matthias Mann has been involved in mass spectrometry based proteomics from the very beginning. As a graduate student with John Fenn at Yale University, he was a member of the team that developed electrospray, a key technology that won the Nobel prize for John Fenn in 2002. Later, his group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory pioneered a set of technologies consisting of the first algorithm to identify peptides in sequence databases by their mass spectrometric fragmentation spectra (‘Peptide Sequence Tag’ algorithm), a method to make small amounts of gel separated proteins amenable to mass spectrometry and a miniaturized, highly efficient version of electrospray working at extremely low flow rates (‘nanoelectrospray’). This allowed extremely sensitive protein sequencing and resulted in the cloning of important biological molecules such as the catalytic subunit of telomerase and Caspase-8. His group also performed the first, large scale identification of proteins linking ‘proteome’ to genome for the first time. His group also initiated work on protein-protein interaction detection by mass spectrometry and first used mass spectrometry to characterize multi-protein complexes. Recently, Dr. Mann’s group described a quantitative proteomics technology termed Stable Isotope Labeling with Amino acids in Cell culture or SILAC. The SILAC technology has been applied to signal dependent protein – protein interactions and to quantify relative changes in phosphorylation upon signaling. By comparing several states, SILAC has allowed the protein composition of the human nucleolus in response to perturbation to be determined and allowed mapping the time-order of activation in signaling pathways. These developments now allow proteomics to study dynamic processes.