Biophysical Society Bulletin | July/August 2020

Biophysicist in Profile

Andrea Gohlke Areas of Research Biophysical study of protein-small molecule and protein-lipid interactions.

Institution AstraZeneca UK

At-a-Glance

Andrea Gohlke is a senior biophysicist in early stage oncology drug discovery at AstraZeneca in Cambridge, United Kingdom. She grew up in a small town called Uelzen, in northern Germany between Hamburg and Hannover. Her father was a mechanics teacher and her mother a shop assistant at a butcher shop. “My path to university was new to them, they would have rather liked me to earn an income directly after school,” she says, “but then they recognized that science was my passion and were very supportive. They are visiting me regularly abroad which is great.”

Andrea Gohlke

Andrea Gohlke’s favorite subjects in school were math and chemistry. “I liked working with numbers and learning things that were logically connected,” she explains. She graduated secondary school in 2001 and immediately began her under- graduate studies in Molecular Biotechnology and Molecular Life Science at the University of Luebeck, Germany. Her course of study was very interdisciplinary, exposing her to different fields including math, chemistry, biology, physics, informatics, and medicine. She obtained her bachelor of science degree in 2004, followed by a master of science in molecular life science in 2006 at the same university. “During my bachelor’s thesis – titled ‘Calculational Gene Localiza- tion of Dyslexia’ at the Institute of Medical Biometry and Statistics, I focused on biometry and statistics, which I very much enjoyed. But I was missing the lab aspect, so during my master’s thesis, I started to explore the different areas of structural biology and ended up studying galactosyltransfer- ase-ligand interactions using NMR. It was then that I became fascinated with the study of molecular interactions and how to investigate them using physics,” she shares. She further focused in on biophysics during her PhD studies in the group of Roland Winter at the Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology. She explored a variety of methods there, including fluorescence microscopy and spectroscopy, infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy, and surface plasmon resonance spectroscopy to study model membrane interactions of Ras and Amylin. This also got her interested in the assembly of model lipid membranes. “The application of different biophysical methods showed me how important it is to validate results but also that it is crucial to know the limitations of each method.” During this time she also had the opportunity to build up a cell lab from scratch, “to build up experiments studying the interaction of amyloids with cell membranes,” she says. Gohlke joined the Interna- tional Max Planck Research Schools program, where she had her first experience planning a conference.

One of Gohlke’s colleagues in Winter’s lab was Claus Czeslik . “We worked together on establishing new techniques in the lab (FCS, confocal microscopy, and IRRAS),” he says. “We also did some teaching activities together — supervising exams, practical trainings, and oral exams of students. Unfortunate- ly we are currently not working together, however we meet once in a while at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting. Andrea is a very dedicated scientist, simultaneously she has a pronounced sense of humor, which makes working with her very enjoyable and fun.” In 2010 she started as a postdoc in the lab of Nobel laureate James Rothman at Yale University in the United States. “He received his Nobel prize while I was working for him, thus it was an exciting time,” Gohlke shares. There, she studied SNARE-mediated membrane fusion using biophysics. “My goal was to recreate the process in a model membrane system and study it with TIRF and confocal microscopy on a single vesicle level,” she says. “I developed a new protocol which integrates the t-SNAREs into freestanding bilayer and then studied liposomes containing v-SNAREs fusing to them.” After two and a half years, she began to find it difficult to be so far from her family. “Fortunately, my collaborator Frederic Pincet at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France, of- fered me the opportunity to continue my work in his lab while still being supported by James Rothman ,” she explains. “Over- all, it was a great experience. I had the chance to directly learn from Jim, who was very supportive and always seemed open to new ideas. He is certainly a person to look up to.” Her colleague in Pincet’s group, Yong Jian Wang , did not work with her on the same project, but both worked with SNARE proteins. “Andrea Gohlke has many excellent qualities,” he says. “The most memorable one is that she is willing to help others by providing her constructive ideas.”

July/August 2020

4

T H E N E W S L E T T E R O F T H E B I O P H Y S I C A L S O C I E T Y