Dr. Philipp Mertins

Scientific Scope

Our platform provides high-throughput techniques for studying the basic function and regulation of proteins in health and disease. This helps to identify new candidates for novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.

Proteomics enables the global and targeted analysis of all proteins and their functional states. Proteins are central to most biological functions within an organism and frequently alter in their abundance and in their activation status in disease. Thus, proteins are routinely used as disease biomarkers as well as drug targets.

To elucidate how proteins work, proteomics approaches make use of mass spectrometers. These high-throughput instruments allow proteins extracted from cells, tissues, and blood samples to be identified and quantified. In addition, it is possible to explore the binding partners of proteins, their localization in cells and tissues, and their functional activity.

Selected References

• Friedrich, C., Schallenberg, S., Kirchner, M., Ziehm, M., Niquet, S., Haji, M., Beier, C., Neudecker, J., Klauschen, F., Mertins, P.(2021). "Comprehensive micro-scaled proteome and phosphoproteome characterization of archived retrospective cancer repositories". Nat Commun. 2021 Jun 11;12(1):3576. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-23855-w. PMID: 34117251; PMCID: PMC8196151.
• Ramberger, E., Suarez-Artiles, L., Perez-Hernandez, D., Haji, M., Popp, O., Reimer, U., Leutz, A., Dittmar, G., Mertins, P. (2021). "A Universal Peptide Matrix Interactomics Approach to Disclose Motif-Dependent Protein Binding." Mol Cell Proteomics. 2021;20:100135. doi: 10.1016/j.mcpro.2021.100135. Epub 2021 Aug 13. PMID: 34391889; PMCID: PMC8453223.
• Lo, A., Holmes, K., Kamlapurkar, S., Mundt, F., Moorthi, S., Fung, I., Fereshetian, S., Watson, J., Carr, S.A., Mertins, P., Berger, A.H. (2021) "Multiomic characterization of oncogenic signaling mediated by wild-type and mutant RIT1". Sci Signal. 2021 Nov 30;14(711):eabc4520. doi: 10.1126/scisignal.abc4520. Epub 2021 Nov 30. PMID: 34846918.
• Udeshi, N.D., Mani, D.C., Satpathy, S., Fereshetian, S., Gasser, J.A., Svinkina, T., Olive, M.E., Ebert, B.L., Mertins, P., Carr, S.A.(2020). "Rapid and deep-scale ubiquitylation profiling for biology and translational research". Nat Commun. 2020 Jan 17;11(1):359. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-14175-1. PMID: 31953384; PMCID: PMC6969155. 
• Mertins, P., Tang, L.C., Krug, K., Clark, D.J., Gritsenko, M.A., Chen, L., Clauser, K.R., Clauss, T.R., Shah, P., Gillette, M.A., Petyuk, V.A., Thomas, S.N., Mani, D.R., Mundt, F., Moore, R.J., Hu, Y., Zhao, R., Schnaubelt, M., Keshishian, H., Monroe, M.E., Zhang, Z., Udeshi, N.D., Mani, D., Davies, S.R., Townsend, R.R., Chan, D.W., Smith, R.D., Zhang, H., Liu, T., Carr, S.A.(2018) "Reproducible workflow for multiplexed deep-scale proteome and phosphoproteome analysis of tumor tissues by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry". Nat Protoc. 2018 Jul;13(7):1632-1661. doi: 10.1038/s41596-018-0006-9. PMID: 29988108; PMCID: PMC6211289.