Béla Frohn
PhD Student
Taking a break from studying medicine at the Technical University of Munich, Béla obtained his M.Sc. in Bioinformatics from the University of Edinburgh (UK) in 2019, where he studied post-translational RNA modifications in Trypanosomes. He subsequently joined the Cox lab at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry for his MD thesis, where he worked on the evolution of cell division in Archaea, and developed software for high-throughput analysis of fMRI data in collaboration with the University of Bergen (Norway). In the end of 2020, he was accepted at the Graduade School for Quantitative Biosciences Munich and started his PhD in the lab of Petra Schwille in 2021. In his research he investigates the emergence of protein function as a result of physical properties and dynamical networks.
Research Interests
Protein Design, (Evolution of) Protein Function, Computational Biology, Minimal Protein Machineries
Awards
| 2024 | Junior Scientist Publication Award (JSPA) of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (shared with Shunshi Kohyama) |
| 2023 | Invited to (and participated in) the 72nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting |
| 2018 - 2021 | Member of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) |
Publications
Frohn, B.P., Kohyama, S., Schwille, P.
Protein design and optimization for synthetic cells.
Nature Reviews Bioengineering (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-025-00318-1
Nachmias, D., Frohn, B.P., Sachse, C., Mizrahi, I, Elia, N
ESCRTs–a multi-purpose membrane remodeling device encoded in all life forms
Trends in Microbiology (2025) doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2025.01.009
Kohyama, S.*, Frohn, B. P.*, Babl, L., Schwille, P.
(*contributed equally)
Machine learning-aided design and screening of an emergent protein function in synthetic cells
Nature Communications (2024) doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46203-0
Schwille, P., Frohn, B. P.
Hidden protein functions and what they may teach us
Trends in Cell Biol. (2022) doi.org/10.1016/j.tcb.2021.09.006
Frohn, B. P., Härtel, T., Cox, J., Schwille, P.
Tracing back variations in archaeal ESCRT-based cell division to protein domain architectures
PLoS ONE (2022) doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266395
Nachmias, D., Melnikov, N., Zorea, A., Sharon, M., Yemini, R., De-picchoto, Y., Tsirkas, I., Aharoni, A., Frohn, B.P., Schwille, P., Zarivach, R., Mizrahi, I. and Elia, N.
Asgard ESCRT-III and VPS4 reveal conserved chromatin binding properties of the ESCRT machinery.
ISME Journal (2022) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-022-01328-2
Collaboration Partners
