Claus-Dieter Kuhn

Claus-Dieter Kuhn (* 1978 in Mutlangen ) is a German biochemist and structural biologist, known for research on ribonucleic acids .

Kuhn studied biochemistry at the University of Regensburg and Stockholm University with a master's degree in chemistry and received his doctorate in 2008 from the gene center of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich with Patrick Cramer , for which he received a doctoral award and the university's Roman award. He then worked at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory , interrupted in 2009 for a year at Proteros Biostructures in Martinsried near Munich. Kuhn had broken off his postdoctoral period in the USA for personal reasons, but took it back to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2010. There he dealt with the mechanisms of RNA interference in humans and especially the structure of the argonaut protein Argonaute -2 (clarified by Elad Elkayam in Cold Spring Harbor in 2012), and after his return clarified the mechanism of how unstable t- RNA is distinguished from correct t-RNA in the cell. He partly worked with Jeremy Wilusz. From 2014 he has been leading a junior research group at the Research Center for Bio-Macromolecules at the University of Bayreuth .

He researched the current research area of RNA interference, i.e. the role of ribonucleic acids in the cell, beyond their role as part of the translation machinery for protein biosynthesis and coding for proteins. Kuhn found that defective t-RNA labels itself before it is released for degradation in the cell (using the CCA-adding enzyme that labels defective and correct t-RNA). To do this, he had to elucidate around a dozen structures of biological macromolecules. He also clarified the role of the enzyme Argonaute-2, which regulates protein biosynthesis by working together with a short-stranded RNA ( small interfering RNA or microRNA ) to cut the complementary m-RNA (it is part of the RNA-induced silencing complex , RISC). RNA-mediated gene disconnection has potential applications in cancer therapy, among other things.

In his doctoral thesis, Kuhn also dealt with the structure of RNA polymerase I, of which he took molecular snapshots with X-ray crystallography and contributed to the structure elucidation (its full structure was not finally clarified until 2013).

In 2016 he received the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Young Talent Award . He received a Kekulé grant from the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie.

Fonts

Kuhn, Cramer et al. a .: Functional architecture of RNA polymerase I., Cell, Volume 131, 2007, pp. 1260-1272, PMID 18160037
Kuhn, Cramer et al. a .: Structure of eukaryotic RNA polymerases, Ann. Rev. Biophys., Vol. 37, 2008, pp. 337-352, PMID 18573085
Elkayam, Kuhn et al. a .: The structure of human argonaute-2 in complex with miR-20a, Cell, Volume 150, 2012, pp. 100-110, PMID 22682761
with Leemor Joshua-Tor : Eukaryotic Argonautes come into focus, Trends Biochem. Sci., Vol. 28, 2013, pp. 263-271, PMID 23541793
Kuhn, Wilusz, Joshua-Tor u. a .: On-enzyme refolding permits small RNA and tRNA surveillance by the CCA-adding enzyme, Cell, Volume 160, 2015, pp. 644-658, PMID 25640237
Kuhn: RNA versatility governs tRNA function, BioEssays, Volume 38, 2016, pp. 465-473

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personal data
SURNAME	Kuhn, Claus-Dieter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH	1978
PLACE OF BIRTH	Courageous