History
History of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biophysics
Since its foundation in 1963 by Prof. Robert Schwyzer, the research focus of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biophysics has been the elucidation of the structure and molecular mechanisms of biological macromolecules. The institute, which initially had been situated at the ETH campus in the center of Zurich, moved to the HPM building on the ETH Hönggerberg campus in 1970 and to the newly renovated HPK building on Hönggerberg in 2001, where it is located since then. With the appointments of Prof. Herbert Zuber (1968) and Prof. Josef Rudinger (1970), research in the beginning concentrated on the synthesis and structural characterization of peptides and light-harvesting proteins.
With the arrival of Prof. Kurt Wüthrich in 1969, the development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy for determination of three-dimensional protein structures and characterization of dynamic processes in biological macromolecules became another research focus of the Institute. Prof. Kurt Wüthrich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2002 for his pioneering work at the Institute. Prof. Timothy Richmond, who was appointed professor at ETH in 1987, established X-ray crystallography of proteins and protein-nucleic acid complexes at ETH. Since then, structure-based research on the molecular mechanisms underlying the function of biological macromolecules has remained in the center of research, reflected in the appointments of Profs. Rudi Glockshuber (1994; protein folding and assembly), Nenad Ban (2000; structure determination of ribosomes and supramolecular complexes by X-ray crystallography and single particle cryo-electron microscopy), Frédéric Allain (2001-2019; NMR structure determination of protein-nucleic acid complexes), Kaspar Locher (2003; X-ray crystallography of membrane proteins), Gerhard Wider (2003-2017; NMR techniques and NMR structure determination of proteins), Eilika Weber-Ban (2003; mechanisms of protein degradation by chaperone-protease complexes), Martin Pilhofer (2014; cryo electron tomography and cell-cell interactions), Stefanie Jonas (2017; assembly of RNA-protein complexes), Volodymyr Korkhov (2021; molecular mechanisms of signal transduction; joint appointment with the Paul Scherrer Institute), Manuela Hospenthal (2021; natural transformation) and Michal Wieczorek (2022; integrated structural biology of the cytoskeleton).