Background
Brünger, Axel Thomas was born on November 25, 1956 in Leipzig, Germany. Son of Hans and Hildegard (Müller) Brünger. came to the United States, 1982.
biophysicist educator researcher
Brünger, Axel Thomas was born on November 25, 1956 in Leipzig, Germany. Son of Hans and Hildegard (Müller) Brünger. came to the United States, 1982.
He graduated with a degree in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Hamburg in 1977. He completed his Diplom in Physics from the University of Hamburg in 1980. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Biophysics from Technical University of Munich in 1982, advised by Klaus Schulten.
He is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, and Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He joined the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry department at Yale University in 1987 and moved to Stanford University in 2000. Brunger is known for developing a computer program called Central Nervous System used for solving structures based on X-ray diffraction or solution Nuclear magnetic resonance data, which was first released in 1992.
The program is a major extension of a 1987 program developed with John Kuriyan and Karplus called X-PLOR, whose original inspiration was motivated by Marius Clore"s efforts in interpreting Nuclear magnetic resonance data and which has been extended by Clore"s continued development of XPLOR-National Institutes of Health. These programs make use of a method called simulated annealing in conjunction with molecular dynamics to refine protein structures.
X-PLOR was the first time a modern optimization technique was applied to the problem of crystallographic refinement. Brunger also subsequently introduced the RFree technique to cross-validate the model given the observed data.
In the mid-1990s, his team extended X-PLOR into a complete system to solve structures, which then became the more full-featured tool Central Nervous System, capable of performing a series of steps necessary for crystallography structure determination, such as obtaining phases from experimental data and molecular replacement phasing from known homologous structures. Brunger"s research group currently studies the molecular mechanism of synaptic vesicle fusion in neurotransmission.
Member American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Sciences, American Crystallographic Association, American Chemical Society, Protein Society.