Essen. When it pinches and twitches in the body, he tries to solve problems for the time being. For example with lysosomes. They remove old or damaged cells and their components. Prof. Dr. Dominic Winter researches how this “recycling center” works – and how defects play a role in its composition, for example. The German Research Foundation has awarded Winter for its research with a Heisenberg professorship. He represents the professorship for ‘Oncological Proteometabolomics’ at the Research Center One Health Ruhr of the University Alliance Ruhr and at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Lysosomes are small bubbles in our cells. They contain enzymes that reduce harmful and no longer used substances such as proteins or bacteria. If this “waste disposal” no longer works, in addition to cancer, diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s can also arise.
Prof. Dr. Dominic Winter and its research group at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) take a close look at the lysosomes with the so-called mass spectrometry. They measure how many proteins (proteins) occur where they are, how long they last and how they work together. Proteins are central to almost all biological processes – also when creating cancer. “The more we know about the metabolism of the cancer cells, the better we can fight them. Among other things, we analyze which proteins in the cells are over-depressed.
In addition to mass spectrometry, UDE professor Winter and his team carry out biochemical, cell and molecular biological experiments. “The attempts enable us to analyze lysosome -related biological questions with the latest analytical methods. We have thus become one of the world’s leading groups in the mass spectrometric examination of lysosomes.”
After studying biotechnology at the Technical University of Bingen (2001-2005), Dominic Winter at the University of Heidelberg in 2008 received his doctorate in the subject of biology. From 2009 to 2012, he researched Fellow in the USA at Harvard Medical School, Boston. Back in Germany, he headed a research group at the Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Bonn from 2012, where he was appointed to the temporary academic council in 2020. His research has been awarded and promoted several times, most recently with the Heisenberg professorship.
