Devastating diseases directly or indirectly affect everyone, and the root causes of these diseases often lie in how proteins work or fail to work. Proteins are also key player in infectious diseases as they mediate entry of viral and bacterial pathogens into the host cell and also play an important role in the cell defense against the pathogens. The main step for the elucidation of the complex in whole living cells is the understanding of the structure, dynamics, and function of proteins that play the key role in these processes.

The research in our group is of a very interdisciplinary nature and includes X-ray crystallography, protein engineering, biophysics, and bioinformatics tools aiming to provide knowledge of the three-dimensional structure of proteins and analysis of their various interactions and ligand complexes. We use the state-of-the-art technology of serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) at X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs) to take snapshots of protein movements to understand how they function. This knowledge will enable us to convert those snapshots into “molecular movies” of how proteins move and interact with their partners to ultimately develop more effective and lower cost treatments.