Robert Tampé

Robert Tampé (born August 14, 1961) is a German biochemist. Since 2001, he is director of the Institute of Biochemistry at Goethe University Frankfurt. As a Max Kade fellow, he worked with Harden M. McConnell at Stanford University from 1990 to 1991. Afterwards, he worked at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany until 1998, where he led an independent research group and began his work on antigen processing. At the same time, he established an independent junior research group in the field of membrane biophysics at the Technical University of Munich, where he habilitated in 1996 in the subject of biochemistry. In 2001, Tampé took on a professorship at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where he has also been director of the Institute for Biochemistry since then. In 2009, he received a visiting professorship at the University of California, San Francisco and in 2010 an honorary guest professorship at Kyoto University in Japan. Since 2017, Tampé holds visiting professorships at the University of Oxford (Department of Biochemistry) and at Merton College in Oxford. In 2019, he declined an offer as director of the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology and Head of Joint Research Departments at University College London and at Birkbeck, University of London.

Tampé is co-initiator and member of several Graduate Schools funded by the DFG, EU or MPG. He is a member of several research advisory boards, international committees and research associations as well as the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and acts as curator of the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Early Career Award. He was also co-founder and board member of the Cluster of Excellence Frankfurt Macromolecular Complexes and director of several research centers, including the Collaborative Research Centers (Sonderforschungsbereiche) SFB 628 and SFB 807.

Selected publications 2022–2015 Sušac L, Yuong MT, Thomas C, von Bülow S, O’Brien-Ball C, Santos AM, Fernandes RA, Hummer G, Tampé R, Davis SJ (2022): Structure of a fully assembled tumor-specific T-cell receptor ligated by pMHC. Cell 185, 3201–13. Sánchez MF, Els-Heindl S, Beck-Sickinger AG, Wieneke R, Tampé R (2021): Photo-induced receptor confinement drives ligand-independent GPCR signaling. Science, eabb7657 Blees A, Januliene D, Hofmann T, Koller N, Schmidt C, Trowitzsch S, Moeller A, Tampé R (2017): Structure of the human MHC-I peptide-loading complex. Nature 551, 525–8. Thomas C, Tampé R (2017): Structure of the TAPBPR-MHC I complex defines the mechanism of peptide loading and editing. Science 358, 1060–4. Domnick A, Winter C, Sušac L, Hennecke L, Hensen M, Zitzmann N, Trowitzsch S, Thomas C, Tampé R (2022): Molecular basis of MHC I quality control in the peptide loading complex. Nature Communications 13, 4701. Müller IK, Winter C, Thomas C, Spaapen RM, Trowitzsch S, Tampé R (2022): Structure of an MHC I-tapasin-ERp57 editing complex defines chaperone promiscuity. Nature Communications , 13, 5283. Nürenberg-Goloub E, Kratzat H, Heilemann H, Heuer A, Kötter P, Berninghausen O, Becker T, Tampé R, Beckmann R (2020): Molecular analysis of the ribosome recycling factor ABCE1 bound to the 30S post-splitting complex. The EMBO Journal, 39, e103788. Heuer A, Gerovac M, Schmidt C, Trowitzsch S, Preis A, Kötter P, Berninghausen O, Becker T, Beckmann R, Tampé R (2017): Structure of the 40S-ABCE1 post-splitting complex in ribosome recycling and translation initiation. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 24, 453–60. Hofmann S, Januliene D, Mehdipour AR, Thomas C, Stefan E, Brüchert S, Kuhn BT, Geertsma ER, Hummer G, Tampé R, Moeller A (2019): Conformation space of a heterodimeric ABC exporter under turnover conditions. Nature 471, 580–3. Kim JM, Wu S, Tomasiak T, Mergel C, Winter MN, Stiller S, Robles-Colmanares Y, Stroud RM*, Tampé R, Craik CS, Cheng Y (2015): Subnanometre-resolution electron cryomicroscopy structure of a heterodimeric ABC exporter. Nature 517, 396–400.