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Professor Sebastian Guettler

Deputy Head of Division and Group Leader

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Professor Sebastian Guettler is Deputy Head of the Division of Structural Biology. He studies the precise molecular mechanisms of signalling processes central to cancer stem cell function, with a particular interest in ADP-ribosylation in signal transduction. His previous work on tankyrase, a poly(ADP-ribose)polymerase (PARP), helped to explain how the rare human disease cherubism is caused. Group: Structural Biology of Cell Signalling
+44 20 7153 5122 ORCID 0000-0002-3135-1546

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Biography

Professor Sebastian Guettler studied Biology, Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at the Universities of Jena and Heidelberg (Germany) and undertook his MSc research with Dr Giulio Superti-Furga at EMBL.

For his PhD project, Sebastian joined Dr Richard Treisman’s laboratory at the London Research Institute of Cancer Research UK (now part of the Francis Crick Institute) where he studied how actin controls MRTF-A, a transcriptional coactivator of Serum Response Factor (SRF).

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For his postdoctoral research, he joined the laboratories of Dr Frank Sicheri and Dr Tony Pawson at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto. There, Sebastian uncovered the structural basis of the substrate targeting mechanism to the poly(ADP-ribose)polymerase Tankyrase, thereby enabling the successful prediction of novel Tankyrase substrates and explaining why mutations in the adaptor protein 3BP2 cause cherubism, a rare human disease.

In October 2012, Sebastian joined the Divisions of Structural and Cancer Biology at the ICR. His laboratory studies how ADP-ribosylation regulates cell signalling, in particular Wnt/β-catenin signalling and telomere homeostasis, using a combination of biochemistry, structural biology and cell biology approaches.

Professor Guettler gained the title of Reader at the ICR in 2019, became Deputy Head of the Division of Structural Biology in May 2020 and was conferred with the title of Professor in 2022.