Quick Facts
Biography
Martin Spiess is a Swiss Biochemist and Professor at the Biozentrum University of Basel, Switzerland.
Life
Martin Spiess studied and graduated with a doctorate in biochemistry at the ETH Zurich. In 1983 he began research as a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, USA, returning in 1985 to the ETH Zurich. In 1986 he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, where he has taught and continued to conduct research, since 1993 as Associate Professor, since 2004 as Professor of Biochemistry and where he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Science from 2010-2012.
Work
Martin Spiess investigates topogenesis and the intracellular transport of membrane proteins in eukaryotic cells. He studies the mechanism of translocon function and how proteins are sorted in the cell and transported to their designated organelles.Spiess discovered that the translocon, in particular the asymmetric polarity along the pore, determines the thermodynamic equilibrium between integration of individual proteins segments into the cell membrane and their further transport. Further studies demonstrated that the orientation of transmembrane segments are defined through the flanking charges, the folding of neighboring segments as well as the hydrophobic properties of the sequences themselves.
Awards and honors
- 1989 FEBS Anniversary Prize of the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM)
- 1991 Helmut Horten Incentive Prize
- 1997 Elected Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)