Our researchers - Professor Dr Markus Ralser

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Professor Dr Markus Ralser

Senior Group Leader

Francis Crick Institute

The Francis Crick Institute & Charité University Medicine

markus.ralser@crick.ac.uk

Institution profile

Contributing to research themes:

Markus Ralser (*1980), Prof. Dr Mag, Einstein Professor of Biochemistry, is Senior Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute, and Head of the Department of Biochemistry at the Charitè University Medicine (the joint medical faculty of Humboldt and Free state Universities in Berlin, Germany) while being a Senior Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute (London).

Previously, he was a Group Leader at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, a position he took after being trained in mass spectrometry at VU Amsterdam (Netherlands), and being a Junior group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (Berlin).

The Ralser lab is known for fundamental discoveries that have improved our understanding of how cells can coordinate hundreds of biochemical reactions assembled in the metabolic network, and for the development of high-throughput mass spectrometry technologies. Major publications from the Ralser lab have linked each yeast gene to its role in metabolism, and have shown that metabolism is much more flexible and integrated into the physiology of cells than it was expected only a few years ago. Moreover, results obtained in the Ralser lab have provided fundamental insights on how central carbon metabolism could have evolved in early life forms, how reactions can co-occur within a cell despite competing chemistries, and how yeast and cancer cells reconfigure metabolism to be protected against oxidative stress.

The Ralser lab is/has been the recipient of substantial funding by The Crick, the Wellcome Trust, the ERC, EMBO, the BMBF (Germany), the Max Planck Society and the BBSRC. Markus Ralser was selected into the EMBO Young investigator programme, is a Wellcome Trust Beit fellow, and is a recipient of the 2008 BioMed central Research Award, the 2017 Colworth Medal of the Biochemical Society, and the 2019 Starling Medal of the Endocrinological Society.