Lectures and seminars Guest seminar - Dr. Thomas Boehm
Monday, December 28 at 15:00 in room Ragnar Granit, Biomedicum. Title: “Domestication and innovation: Half a billion years of vertebrate immunity”.
Welcome to a guest seminar by Dr. Thomas Boehm
Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen. Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, Freiburg
About
Thomas Boehm, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tuebingen, studies the evolution of vertebrate immune systems and the function of the thymus and T cell development.
He graduated from Goethe University Frankfurt with an MD degree. After residency training in pediatrics, he continued as a postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (England). He then took faculty positions at the University of Freiburg (Germany), the German Cancer Center Heidelberg (Germany), and the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, where he served as director until 2024.
He serves on external advisory boards for academic research institutes in multiple countries, chairs the Scientific Councils of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation, and the Jung Foundation for Medicine, and serves as Vice-President of the German Academy of Sciences.
He has received a number of awards for his work, and has been elected to a number of learned societies, including the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His current work focuses on the adaptive immune system of lampreys and the variant immune constellations of deep-sea anglerfishes exercising sexual parasitism.
Emeritus Laboratory Thomas Boehm
Publications
Developmental trajectory and evolutionary origin of thymic mimetic cells.
Nusser A, Thomas OS, Zhang G, Nagakubo D, Arrigoni L, Krauth B, Boehm T
Nature 2025 Jul;643(8073):1066-1075
This work proposes an evolutionary model for the emergence of central tolerance induction in the thymus.
Origin and evolutionary malleability of T cell receptor α diversity.
Giorgetti OB, O'Meara CP, Schorpp M, Boehm T
Nature 2023 Jul;619(7968):193-200
This work proposes a mechanism by which the diversity of assembled antigen receptors is determined by germline sequences.
Tnpo3 controls splicing of the pre-mRNA encoding the canonical TCR α chain of iNKT cells.
Iwanami N, Richter AS, Sikora K, Boehm T
Nat Commun 2023 Jun;14(1):3645
This work identified an unexpected mechanism for gene-specific splicing of T cell receptor variable α genes.
Developmental dynamics of two bipotent thymic epithelial progenitor types.
Nusser A, Sagar , Swann JB, Krauth B, Diekhoff D, Calderon L, Happe C, Grün D, Boehm T
Nature 2022 Jun;606(7912):165-171
This work described the emergence of cortical and medullary compartments of the thymus as a consequence of developmentally regulated activity of distinct epithelial precursors.
Antigen receptor repertoires of one of the smallest known vertebrates.
Giorgetti OB, Shingate P, O'Meara CP, Ravi V, Pillai NE, Tay BH, Prasad A, Iwanami N, Tan HH, Schorpp M, Venkatesh B, Boehm T
Sci Adv 2021 Jan;7(1):
This work identifies fractality as a general characteristic of antigen receptor repertoires.