Michael Sattler studied chemistry and developed novel nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-spectroscopy methods to study biological macromolecules during his doctoral studies at the University of Frankfurt. As a postdoc with Steve Fesik (Abbott labs) he employed advanced NMR methods to solve landmark structures of Bcl family proteins involved in the regulation of apoptosis signaling. With his own research group established at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, in 1997, he pioneered structural biology of proteins and RNAs that play critical roles in eukaryotic gene regulation, such as alternative pre-mRNA splicing in collaboration with Juan Valcarcel (now at CRG Barcelona) and mechanisms of non-coding RNAs.

Since moving to Helmholtz Munich and TUM in 2007 his lab studies the structural mechanisms and functional roles of essential steps in the early assembly and biogenesis of the spliceosome and its regulation. These studies revealed unique insight into the recognition of the key RNA motifs at the 3’ splice site of human introns by essential splicing factors, SF1 (Science 2001) and U2AF (Nature 2011), highlighting how dynamic recognition enables graduated regulation. His lab unraveled the structural basis of the recognition of arginine methylation marks by the Survival of Motor Neurons (SMN) Tudor domain, linked to spinal muscular atrophy disease.

Michael developed efficient protocols for integrative structural biology in solution by combining NMR, small angle scattering, crystallography and cryo-EM and helped to establish high-end infrastructures for structural biology (1.2 GHz NMR, www.bnmrz.org, and cryo-EM).

Current work focusses on structure and dynamics of (long) non-coding RNAs implicated in human disease, their regulation by posttranscriptional modifications (i.e. m6A) and RNA binding proteins, as well as structural dynamics in biological and disease-linked cellular pathways involving the molecular chaperone Hsp90 and peroxisome biogenesis pathways.

Insight into structural mechanisms of disease pathways provides the basis for innovative structure-based drug discovery to develop novel therapeutic approaches for human disease, including cancer, genetic disorders, and (neglected) infectious diseases.

Integrative structural biology biomolecular NMR-spectroscopy structure-based drug discovery

RNA-based gene regulationalternative splicingmiRNA processingcellular signalingperoxisome biogenesismolecular chaperones Hsp90