Molecular Biomechanics (MBM)

The Molecular Biomechanics group was a highly interdisciplinary group comprising physicists, chemists, and biologists. They made use and further developed various computational and theoretical techniques, among others Molecular Dynamics simulations, Monte Carlo techniques, quantum chemistry, machine learning, and bioinformatics approaches. They also embarked on biophysical and biochemical experiments to validate their computational predictions.

The major interest of the group was to decipher how proteins have been designed to specifically respond to mechanical forces in the cellular environment or outside of the cell. Their aim was to discover new molecular force sensors of living organisms, and to decipher their inner workings. Research focused on protein materials, mechanoenzymes, and disordered proteins.

In 2024 MBM Group Leader Frauke Gräter was appointed Director at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP) and left HITS at the end of that year. Her new department at the MPIP has the same name – Molecular Biomechanics: https://www.mpip-mainz.mpg.de/en/graeter. Gräter and her department still collaborate closely with HITS researchers, especially with the MLI group led by Jan Stühmer. In addition, they are an associate partner of SIMPLAIX, 3-way inter-institutional cooperation on bridging scales from molecules to molecular materials by multiscale simulation and machine learning.