Profile of Patrick Cramer

Abstract

Patrick Cramer’s interest in the scientific method may have been sparked by a childhood gift. While growing up, his parents gave him a kit to try little experiments at home that inspired him to become a scientist. Patrick Cramer. Image credit: Patrick Cramer. Cramer studied chemistry, first at the University of Stuttgart and later at Heidelberg University in Germany. “I was in love with the beauty of biological molecules, so I moved into biochemistry and then into structural biology,” says Cramer. This move was facilitated by stints at the University of Bristol and Cambridge University. “At Cambridge I really fell in love with structural biology, and so I chose that as a subject for my PhD studies at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory,” he says. At the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Grenoble, France, Cramer began to study gene transcription, launching a career unraveling the mysteries of this fundamental biological process. Cramer has determined the three-dimensional (3D) structure of transcription complexes, providing numerous insights into the mechanisms of transcription initiation, elongation, and regulation. He has also contributed to the development of functional genomics and computational biology to study how the genome is transcribed and regulated in living cells and understand how gene activity is controlled. Now director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen, Germany, Cramer was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020. In his Inaugural Article (1), his team describes the first structures of the highly conserved transcription factor TATA-box binding protein (TBP) in complex with a nucleosome. When Cramer received his doctorate in 1998, a major question about transcription was the structure of RNA polymerase II, the central enzyme that makes messenger RNA. To work on this problem, he joined Roger Kornberg’s laboratory at Stanford University as a postdoctoral researcher, funded by …