Matthias Hentze

Matthias W. Hentze (b. 25 January 1960, Rheda-Wiedenbrück, Germany) is a German scientist.

Biography

Hentze obtained his Abitur from the Ratsgymnasium in Rheda-Wiedenbrück in 1978. He studied medicine at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany, and at the Medical Schools of Southampton, Oxford, Glasgow, and Cambridge, UK. In 1984 he obtained the German medical board certification and received his M.D. from the University of Münster for his work on lysosomal enzyme biogenesis and transport^[1] in the laboratory of Kurt von Figura. In 1990, he obtained his Habilitation at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Hentze is married and has three daughters. He regularly participates in city marathons of the World Marathon Majors series (New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Berlin) and is a qualified member of the Berlin Marathon Jubilee Club.

Professional career

In 1985, after a brief residency in internal medicine, Hentze joined the laboratory of Richard D. Klausner at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA as a postdoctoral fellow supported by a fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 1987, Hentze and his colleagues discovered iron-responsive elements (IRE), showing for the first time gene regulation at the translational level in animal cells. In 1989, he joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg as a group leader. He served as Dean of the EMBL International Ph.D. Programme from 1996 until 2005 when he became Associate Director of the EMBL. In the same year, he became Professor for Molecular Medicine at the University of Heidelberg. Together with Andreas Kulozik of the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University, Hentze co-founded the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit (MMPU) (2002) and serves as its Co-Director. As the first institutional partnership between the EMBL and a national institution, the MMPU pioneers interdisciplinary research at the interface between molecular biology and clinical medicine. Hentze is also an Honorary Faculty Member of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia.

Hentze’s research team studies translational control by regulatory factors (RNA-binding proteins, microRNAs), which is now recognized to play important roles in development, central nervous system function, cancer, and many other diseases. Within the MMPU, Hentze contributes to investigations into diseases of RNA metabolism, especially on nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) and 3’end formation. Recently, Hentze proposed the concept of "REM networks", which posits that cellular metabolism and gene expression are connected via "RNA-binding" enzymes. (Hentze and Preiss, 2010)

Hentze is a co-founder of Anadys Pharmaceuticals, San Diego, California.

Honors, awards and society memberships

Hentze is an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the European Academy of Sciences, and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). He has received numerous awards and honorary lectureships, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2000), the Lautenschlaeger Research Prize of Heidelberg University (2007) and the Princesses' Lecture of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute (2010). Hentze is a member of national and international academic societies, including the RNA Society, the BioIron Society (which he co-founded), and the German Gesellschaft fuer Biochemie und Molekularbiologie (GBM).

Public service

Hentze serves in numerous international advisory functions. He has helped to launch the journals EMBO Reports (2000) and EMBO Molecular Medicine (2009) and is a member of the editorial boards of Molecular Cell, RNA, Trends in Biochemical Sciences, Journal of Molecular Medicine, and EMBO Molecular Medicine. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Centro de Biologia Molecular Severo Ochoa (Madrid, Spain), the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (Berlin, Germany), the Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine (Freiburg, Germany), and the Queen's University Belfast Medical School (Belfast, UK).

Selected publications

Hentze has co-authored textbooks in the field of Molecular Medicine and has contributed over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications, including

• Hentze, M.W.; Caughman, S.W.; Rouault, T.A.; Barriocanal, J.G.; Dancis, A.; Harford, J.B.; Klausner, R.D. (1987). "Identification of the iron-responsive element for the translational regulation of human ferritin mRNA". Science 238 (4833): 1570–1573. doi:10.1126/science.3685996. PMID 3685996. 

• Ostareck, D.H.; Ostareck-Lederer, A.; Wilm, M.; Thiele, B.J.; Mann, M.; Hentze, M.W. (1997). "mRNA silencing in erythroid differentiation: hnRNP K and hnRNP E1 regulate 15-lipoxygenase translation from the 3' end". Cell 89 (4): 597–606. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)80241-X. PMID 9160751. 

• Preiss, T.; Hentze, M.W. (1998). "Dual function of the cap structure in poly(A) tail-promoted translation in yeast". Nature 392 (6675): 516–520. doi:10.1038/33192. PMID 9548259. 

• Muckenthaler, M.; Gray, N.K.; Hentze, M.W. (1998). "IRP-1 binding to ferritin mRNA prevents the recruitment of the small ribosomal subunit by the cap-binding complex eIF4F". Molecular Cell 2 (3): 383–388. doi:10.1016/S1097-2765(00)80282-8. PMID 9774976. 

• Ostareck, D.H.; Ostareck-Lederer, A.; Shatsky, I.N.; Hentze, M.W. (2001). "Lipoxygenase mRNA silencing in erythroid differentiation: the 3'UTR regulatory complex controls 60S ribosomal subunit joining". Cell 104 (2): 281–290. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(01)00212-4. PMID 11207368. 

• Muckenthaler, M.; Roy, C.N.; Custodio, A.O.; Minana, B.; Montross, L.K.; Andrews, N.C.; Hentze, M.W.; Hentze, MW (2003). "Regulatory defects in liver and intestine implicate abnormal hepcidin and Cybrd1 expression in mouse hemochromatosis". Nature Genetics 34 (1): 102–107. doi:10.1038/ng1152. PMID 12704390. 

• Beckmann, K.; Grskovic, M.; Gebauer, F.; Hentze, M.W. (2005). "A dual inhibitory mechanism restricts msl-2 mRNA translation for dosage compensation in Drosophila". Cell 122 (4): 529–540. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2005.06.011. PMID 16122421. 

• Thermann, R.; Hentze, M.W. (2007). "Drosophila miR2 induces pseudo-polysomes and inhibits translation initiation". Nature 447 (875–879): 2007. doi:10.1038/nature05878. 

• Gehring, N.H.; Lamprinaki, S.; Kulozik, A.E.; Hentze, M.W. (2009). "Disassembly of Exon Junction. Complexes by PYM". Cell 137 (3): 536–548. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2009.02.042. PMID 19410547. 

• Zdanowicz, A.; Thermann, R.; Kowalska, J.; Jemielity, J.; Duncan, K.; Preiss, T.; Darzynkiewicz, E.; Hentze, M.W. (2009). "Drosophila miR2 Primarily Targets the m7GpppN Cap Structure for Translational Repression". Molecular Cell 35 (6): 881–888. doi:10.1016/j.molcel.2009.09.009. PMID 19782035. 

• Hentze, M.W.; Preiss, T. (2010). "The REM phase of gene regulation". TiBs 35 (8): 423–426. doi:10.1016/j.tibs.2010.05.009. PMID 20554447. 

• Hentze, M.W.; Muckenthaler, M.U.; Galy, B.; Camaschella, C. (2010). "Two to tango: regulation of mammalian iron metabolism". Cell 142 (1): 24–38. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2010.06.028. PMID 20603012. 

External links

At the European Molecular Biology Laboratory:

• Matthias Hentze's staff page
• Matthias Hentze's Group page

Of the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit:

• MMPU Faculty and Organization
• About the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit
• List of Publications

References

1. ^ Matthias Hentze in the German National Library catalogue (German)

Persondata
Name	Hentze, Matthias
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	25 January 1960
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death