Carsten Schultz

For two decades, Carsten Schultz' lab has been developing chemical biology tools to help understanding the cell biology of signaling networks. The techniques permit the visualization as well as the non-invasive manipulation of intact cells. His biological interest focuses a) on ß-cells and on understanding autocrine factors that regulate insulin secretion, b) on the regulation of growth factor signaling and the underlying signaling network, and c) the regulation of intracellular vesicle trafficking by phosphoinositides and sphingosines. The lab is further engaged in measuring protease activities on the surface of immune cells as a marker of lung inflammation.

Among the latest developments are cell arrays that measure up to 40 signaling parameters simultaneously in living cells (Kuchenov et al., 2016), super-fast clicking amino acids for protein tagging in vivo (Plass et al., 2012), multifunctional (caged, crosslinking, clicking) lipid derivatives for studying protein-lipid interactions (Höglinger et al., 2015, 2017) and for triggering cancer cell movement (Hoevelmann et al., 2016), and lipidated FRET sensors for measuring protease activities on cells from sputum (Gehrig et al., 2012, 2014).