Silja Friederike Zedlitz was awarded the 2025 Rainer Rudolph Prize for her Master’s thesis entitled “Minimal rhodamine probes for covalent protein labelling in live cells”.
The work was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research (MPI-MR) in Heidelberg, in the research group led by Prof. Kai Johnsson. In her thesis, Zedlitz developed and characterised minimalist rhodamine probes that enable the covalent labelling of proteins in living cells. This allows proteins to be visualised more quickly, more brightly and with greater precision – an important foundation for quantitative live-cell imaging experiments and for understanding dynamic processes within cells.
Silja Zedlitz is currently working as a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, where she is continuing her research into chemical tools for cell biology.
Rainer-Rudolph Prize winner Tobias Dorer was honoured for his Master’s thesis, “Assessment and development of a pre-existing pipeline for the computational design of multistate proteins.”
The work was carried out within the framework of the Max Planck School Matter to Life at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) – in Tanja Kortemme’s group (School of Pharmacy).
In his thesis, Tobias Dorer evaluated an existing computational pipeline for protein design research and developed it further in a targeted manner. The aim was to design proteins capable of adopting multiple functional states (“multistate proteins”) – a key step towards modelling dynamic biomolecules more realistically and enabling new applications in biotechnology and medicine. Through systematic testing, optimisation and improved evaluation, the work helps to make design decisions more robust and workflows more reproducible.
Tobias Dorer is currently continuing his research as a PhD Fellow at the Novo Nordisk Centre for Protein Design at the University of Copenhagen.