Physicist and bioinformatician, Prof. Dr. Matthias Mann will receive the 2012 Körber Prize for his pioneering efforts to decode the proteome.
The Körber Prize is being presented for the 28th time. The prize is awarded to scientists employed in Europe for groundbreaking research work on novel projects that demonstrate great promise in terms of applications and global impact. Some of the best scientists across Europe constitute the awards selection committee. The decision making trustee committee is chaired by the Max Planck Society President, Prof. Dr. Peter Gruss. The 2012 Körber Prize is to be held on September 7 at 11 am in the Great Hall of Hamburg City Hall. The prizewinner and his project will be presented by Ranga Yogeshwar. The winner will be awarded 750,000 Euros.
Matthias Mann and his team were the first to decode the yeast cell proteome, which is the complete set of proteins in any living organism. Mann was able to accomplish this through a new mass spectrometry technique devised by him that is capable of analyzing all the proteins in a cell at the same time. Until the development of this technique, researchers could only analyze few proteins at a time.
Researchers are trying to map the human proteome. Success in these endeavors will open up new vistas for medicines as proteins are life’s building blocks. Researchers can identify proteins that aid or oppose diseases by comparing the proteome of healthy and diseased cells.