Prof. Thomas Carell

Professional background: Thomas Carell is a Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich where he is leading a research group in chemical biology focused on analysing the chemistry of epigenetic programming in DNA and RNA, and prebiotic chemistry. The Carell group aims to discover conditions, pathways and reaction mechanisms through which the purine and pyrimidine building blocks could have plausibly originated. His academic career began at the Universities of Münster and Heidelberg. In 1993, he obtained his Ph.D. with Prof. H. A. Staab at the Max-Planck Institute of Medical Research and continued with postdoctoral training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA with Prof. J. Rebek. His independent research career started when he moved to ETH Zürich (Switzerland) into the group of Prof. E. Diederich and received his habilitation in 1999. In 2000, he accepted a full Professor position in Organic Chemistry at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg (Germany).

Thomas Carell is a member of the German National Academy Leopoldina and of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of the Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany and since 2019 is a member of the supervisory board of BASF SE.

Selected publications:

• E.S. Schönegger, A. Crisp, M. Radukic, J. Burmester, T. Frischmuth, T. Carell. Orthogonal end labelling of oligonucleotides via dual incorporation of Click reactive NTP analogues, ChemBioChem. 2023. (link)
• J. N. Singer, F. M. Müller, E. Węgrzyn, C. Hölzl, H. Hurmiz, C. Liu, L. Escobar, T. Carell. Loading of Amino Acids onto RNA in a Putative RNA-Peptide World, Angewandte Chemie Intl. Ed.,62, 21, e202302360 (2023).  https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202302360
• B. Searle, M. Müller, T. Carell, A. Kellett. Third Generation Sequencing of Epigenetic DNA, Angewandte Chemie Intl. Ed., 62, 14, e202215704(2022). https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202215704
• E.S. Schönegger, A. Crisp, M. Müller, J. Fertl, S. Serdjukow, S. Croce, M. Kollaschinski, T. Carell, T. Frischmuth. Click Chemistry Enables Rapid Amplification of Full-Length Reverse Transcripts for Long-Read Third Generation Sequencing, Bioconjugate Chemistry, 33, 10, 1789-1795 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.bioconjchem.2c00353
• F. R. Traube, M. Stern, A. J. Tölke, M. Rudelius, E. Mejías-Pérez, N. Raddaoui, B. M. Kümmerer, C. Douat, F. Streshnev, M. Albanese, P. R. Wratil, Y. V. Gärtner, M. Nainytė, G. Giorgio, S. Michalakis, S. Schneider, H. Streeck, M. Müller, O. T. Keppler, T. Carell. Suppression of SARS-CoV-2 Replication with Stabilized and Click-Chemistry modified siRNAs, Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed., 61, 38, e202204556 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202204556
• F. Müller, L. Escobar, F. Xu, E. Węgrzyn, M. Nainytė, T. Amatov, C.-Y. Chan, A. Pichler, T. Carell. A prebiotically plausible scenario of an RNA–peptide world, Nature, 65, 279-284 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04676-3