Bio
Tino obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Göttingen in Germany. He did his graduate work with Dirk Görlich, Ph.D at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences. During his time at Max Planck, Tino established an on-site alpaca farm and developed techniques to engineer alpaca-derived nanobodies as precision tools for structural and cellular biology. For example, he developed anti-IgG secondary nanobodies that replace conventional animal-derived secondary antibodies. This work was awarded the ‘animal welfare research prize’ by the German government. Tino then went on to join the lab of Rebecca Voorhees, Ph.D, at the California Institute of Technology as her first postdoc to study membrane protein biogenesis and assembly at the human endoplasmic reticulum (ER). His work was supported by a Caltech Ross fellowship and a postdoc fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG). In collaboration with other lab members, his work resulted in the first structure of the ER membrane protein complex (EMC), which is crucial for the biogenesis of a vast set of different endogenous as well as viral membrane proteins. He also used the EMC as a model system to understand the regulation of membrane protein complex assembly and discovered a moonlighting, regulatory role for the kinase WNK1 as an EMC assembly factor.
His lab combines molecular, cellular and structural biology to study the pathways and molecular machines that regulate protein homeostasis, with a particular focus on membrane proteins. The Pleiner lab also develops nanobodies as tools to study and reverse failure of protein homeostasis under disease conditions. Tino is a First Generation college graduate and provides mentorship to other First Generation students as part of Stanford's First Generation Mentorship program.
