Welcome Luca!
We’re welcoming our new postdoctoral researcher Dr. Luca Sperotto who will be affiliated with the centre for Chemical Mechanisms of Life.
We’re welcoming our new postdoctoral researcher Dr. Luca Sperotto who will be affiliated with the centre for Chemical Mechanisms of Life.
We are saying goodbye to Joanna Sajkowska. She has moved on to a position at Karolinska Intitutet and will remain affiliated with us to continue collaborating with the lab. Goodbye also to our first CML centre postdoc Vivek Junghare who was apart of our lab for two years.
We are happy to welcome a new B.Sc. student to our lab: Gökalp Eroğul from Izmir Institute of Technology (Izmnir, Turkey). Welcome!
Have you ever considered how different proteins in RNA:protein complexes are visible depending on the ionization mode? See Henry’s work collaborating with Michael Landreh’s lab here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsmeasuresciau.6c00134
We are thrilled to share that the European Research Council has awarded the Petzold Lab an Advanced Grant. This five-year project (DynaMech), will allow us to study the impact of RNA dynamics on cellular function, by measuring it directly in the cell.

Do you need RNase stable RNAs? Circularize them! The structure is maintained and often the dynamics too. AND – plot twist – if not, than you find that the otherwise boring A-form RNA helices actually have a function: Long-distance transport of dynamic information, otherwise called Allostery. Congrats Katja and Henry!!
We are happy to welcome a new M.Sc. student to our lab: Julian Fischer from Goethe University (Frankfurt, Germany). Welcome!
Imagine if one of RNA’s most common 3D contacts could switch off and on. In our preprint, we identified the A-minor switch that can reversibly “escape” their tertiary contacts, revealing a dynamic regulatory layer in RNA structure (shown by NMR & Cryo-EM and assayed in ribosomes). Read more: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.08.718354v1
Enabling 1H R1ρ NMR measurements even when NOE’s are present allowed us to identify one more excited state in the Hoogsteen to Watson-Crick-Franklin equilibrium. Have a look here!
We are happy to welcome Adetutu Oyinloye to the lab as a new Erasmus internship student. She will work on microRNA targeting. Welcome!