The international graduate school, funded by the Excellence Initiative of the Federal State Hamburg, will educate young scientists with an interdisciplinary curriculum allowing them to collect, analyse and publish structural and time-resolved data of medically relevant pathogen/host macromolecular complexes and interactions.

The participating institutions are working on interdisciplinary projects with regard to molecular infection- and structural biology. Questions of the (complex) interplay between pathogens (viruses, bacteria, prions or parasites) and their hosts at different levels of the infection cycle (attachment/adsorption; cell entry; immune system modulation, reproduction and egress) will be targeted to elucidate details of host-pathogen interactions on a molecular level using high structural precision and specificity combined with time-resolved dynamics.

Some of these interactions between pathogens and their host are relatively well studied with regard to cell biology processes and pathogen life cycle. However, the structural and biochemical basis of this is still largely unknown.