User:Rgendres

Robert G. Endres

Robert Endres, born in Germany 1973, is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Prof. Ned Wingreen’s lab at Princeton University, and works at the interface between physics and biology. He is an expert in bacterial chemotaxis, a network of receptors and other proteins which enables bacteria to sense and swim toward nutrients.

In 1999 he received a “Diplom” in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Göttingen in Germany. In 1996/97 he was an exchange student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he mainly took physics courses, but also art and film classes. In 2002 he received a Ph.D. in Physics at the University of California at Davis in California. The Ph.D. was followed by two years of postdoctoral work at Oakridge National Laboratory (ORNL), followed by a short time at NEC Laboratories America.

In graduate school, his research was mainly focused on theoretical condensed matter physics and material science. As an M.S. student, he determined the effects of an impurity in a one-dimensional highly correlated electron system (Luttinger liquid) applying the techniques of bozonization and refermionization. The approach involved analytic as well as numerical calculations. His Ph.D. research was in the theory of electron transfer in chemical and biological materials, with focus on charge transport in DNA specifically. DNA has unusual self-assembly properties which can in principle be used to fabricate inexpensive nano-circuits. The electronic properties of DNA, however, were essentially unexplored. This research culminated with a realistic calculation of the electronic structure of DNA in solvent including ions. During that time he also worked on electron transfer between transition metal ions in solution, which are similar to redox active centers in some proteins. Later at ORNL, he worked on the physics of protein-DNA binding and topics in material science, and continued to move toward biology at NEC. During his research he has applied a variety of different techniques, ranging from simplified (tight-binding) models to realistic all-atom classical and quantum-chemical calculations. He has published journal articles and received invitations to speak at conferences and to contribute book chapters for a wide spectrum of audiences concerning these research directions. As for future goals, he intends to apply this unusually broad research experience to developing novel approaches to problems in molecular biology, ranging from signal transduction to protein complex assembly and noise in biological systems.

Recent Publications:

Endres and Wingreen,

Precise adaptation in bacterial chemotaxis through assistance neighborhoods, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 103, 13040 (2006).

Endres and Wingreen,

Weight matrices for protein-DNA binding sites from a single co-crystal structure, Phys. Rev. E 73, 061921 (2006).

Skoge, Endres, Wingreen,

Receptor-receptor coupling in bacterial chemotaxis: Evidence for strongly-coupled clusters, Biophys. J. 90, 4317 (2006).

Keymer, Endres, Skoge, Meir, Wingreen,

Chemosensing in Escherichia coli: Two regimes of two-state receptors, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 103, 1786 (2006).

Endres, Cox, Singh,

Colloquium: The quest for high-conductance DNA, Rev. Mod. Phys. 76, 195 (2004).