Karsten Suhre, Ph.D.

Research Summary:

In March 2011, I joined the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) as a Full Professor and was named Director of the Bioinformatics Core at the WCM campus in Qatar. From 2006 until joining WCM-Q, I served as Professor in the Department of Biology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany and as Group Leader for Metabolomics Research at the Institute for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology of Helmholtz Center Munich. Between 1994 and 2006, I served at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), first as a Charge and then as a Director of Research, with a two year interruption (2000-2001), where I worked as a Project Engineer in the German Automotive Industry.

After a very interdisciplinary career in the Atmospheric Sciences, and then in Structural and Functional Biology, my research interests since 2006 are now at the intersection of metabolomics and and genomics and their role in human health. On these subjects, I have taught multiple courses, published over 180 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and delivered numerous international presentations. I identify as a Bioinformatician and Systems Biologist, with a strong expertise in designing and leading experimental work, as I am frequently generating my own data as a Principal Investigator using fee-for-service providers.

As a faculty member of WCM since March 2011, I am now studying how genetic variation in human metabolism interacts with environmental challenges and lifestyle factors in the development of complex diseases, especially diabetes, cancer, heart and kidney diseases. My research has shown that knowledge of the genetic basis of metabolic individuality in humans generates many new hypotheses for biomedical and pharmaceutical research, and that it can eventually inform individualized therapy.

My current research efforts are to realize the true potential of the many recent discoveries I made in the field of metabolomics and genomics, by now translating them to clinical and biomedical application. For this purpose I am involved in setting up and supporting industry-level metabolomics and proteomics facilities in Qatar, conducting clinical studies with metabolomics read-outs, developing cell-culture based metabolomics assays for drug testing, mentoring large genome-wide association studies with metabolomics and proteomics, and running a bioinformatics core that focuses on whole genome sequence analysis for the identification of metabolically relevant gene losses in Mendelian disorders.

Selected Publications:

1.  Suhre K, Shin SY, Petersen AK, Mohney RP, Meredith D, Wägele B, Altmaier E; CARDIoGRAM, Deloukas P, Erdmann J, Grundberg E, Hammond CJ, de Angelis MH, Kastenmüller G, Köttgen A, Kronenberg F, Mangino M, Meisinger C, Meitinger T, Mewes HW, Milburn MV, Prehn C, Raffler J, Ried JS, Römisch-Margl W, Samani NJ, Small KS, Wichmann HE, Zhai G, Illig T, Spector TD, Adamski J, Soranzo N, Gieger  C. Human metabolic individuality in biomedical and pharmaceutical research. Nature. 2011 Aug 31;477(7362):54-60. doi: 10.1038/nature10354. PubMed PMID: 21886157; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3832838.
2. Suhre, K., Cammas, J.-P., Nedelec, P., Rosset, R., Marenco, A., Smitt, H.G.J., Ozone-rich transients in the upper equatorial atlantic troposphere (1997) Nature, 388 (6643), pp. 661-663.
3. Suhre K, Sanejouand YH. ElNemo: a normal mode web server for protein movement  analysis and the generation of templates for molecular replacement. Nucleic Acids Res. 2004 Jul 1;32(Web Server issue):W610-4. PubMed PMID: 15215461; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC441506.
4. Suhre K, Wallaschofski H, Raffler J, Friedrich N, Haring R, Michael K, Wasner  C, Krebs A, Kronenberg F, Chang D, Meisinger C, Wichmann HE, Hoffmann W, Völzke H, Völker U, Teumer A, Biffar R, Kocher T, Felix SB, Illig T, Kroemer HK, Gieger  C, Römisch-Margl W, Nauck M. A genome-wide association study of metabolic traits  in human urine. Nat Genet. 2011 Jun;43(6):565-9. doi: 10.1038/ng.837. Epub 2011 May 15. PubMed PMID: 21572414.
5. Suhre K, Gieger C. Genetic variation in metabolic phenotypes: study designs and applications. Nat Rev Genet. 2012 Nov;13(11):759-69. doi: 10.1038/nrg3314. Epub 2012 Oct 3. Review. PubMed PMID: 23032255.
6. Suhre K, Arnold M, Bhagwat AM, Cotton RJ, Engelke R, Raffler J, Sarwath H, Thareja G, Wahl A, DeLisle RK, Gold L, Pezer M, Lauc G, El-Din Selim MA, Mook-Kanamori DO, Al-Dous EK, Mohamoud YA, Malek J, Strauch K, Grallert H, Peters A, Kastenmüller G, Gieger C, Graumann J. Connecting genetic risk to disease end points through the human blood plasma proteome. Nat Commun. 2017 Feb 27;8:14357.  doi: 10.1038/ncomms14357. PubMed PMID: 28240269; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5333359.
7. Suhre K, Schmitt-Kopplin P. MassTRIX: mass translator into pathways. Nucleic Acids Res. 2008 Jul 1;36(Web Server issue):W481-4. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkn194. Epub  2008 Apr 28. PubMed PMID: 18442993; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2447776.
8. Suhre K, Claverie JM. Genomic correlates of hyperthermostability, an update. J Biol Chem. 2003 May 9;278(19):17198-202. Epub 2003 Feb 24. PubMed PMID: 12600994
9. Suhre K, Navaza J, Sanejouand YH. NORMA: a tool for flexible fitting of high-resolution protein structures into low-resolution electron-microscopy-derived density maps. Acta Crystallogr D Biol Crystallogr. 2006 Sep;62(Pt 9):1098-100. Epub 2006 Aug 19. PubMed PMID: 16929111.
10. Suhre K, Sanejouand YH. On the potential of normal-mode analysis for solving difficult molecular-replacement problems. Acta Crystallogr D Biol Crystallogr. 2004 Apr;60(Pt 4):796-9. Epub 2004 Mar 23. PubMed PMID: 15039589.
11. Suhre K, Meisinger C, Döring A, Altmaier E, Belcredi P, Gieger C, Chang D, Milburn MV, Gall WE, Weinberger KM, Mewes HW, Hrabé de Angelis M, Wichmann HE, Kronenberg F, Adamski J, Illig T. Metabolic footprint of diabetes: a multiplatform metabolomics study in an epidemiological setting. PLoS One. 2010 Nov 11;5(11):e13953. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013953. PubMed PMID: 21085649; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2978704.
12. Suhre K. Gene and genome duplication in Acanthamoeba polyphaga Mimivirus. J Virol. 2005 Nov;79(22):14095-101. Erratum in: J Virol. 2005 Dec;79(24):15591. PubMed PMID: 16254344; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1280231.
13. Suhre K, Audic S, Claverie JM. Mimivirus gene promoters exhibit an unprecedented conservation among all eukaryotes. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Oct 11;102(41):14689-93. Epub 2005 Oct 3. PubMed PMID: 16203998; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1239944.
14. Illig T, Gieger C, Zhai G, Römisch-Margl W, Wang-Sattler R, Prehn C, Altmaier  E, Kastenmüller G, Kato BS, Mewes HW, Meitinger T, de Angelis MH, Kronenberg F, Soranzo N, Wichmann HE, Spector TD, Adamski J, Suhre K. A genome-wide perspective of genetic variation in human metabolism. Nat Genet. 2010 Feb;42(2):137-41. doi:  10.1038/ng.507. Epub 2009 Dec 27. PubMed PMID: 20037589; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3773904.
15. Gieger C, Geistlinger L, Altmaier E, Hrabé de Angelis M, Kronenberg F, Meitinger T, Mewes HW, Wichmann HE, Weinberger KM, Adamski J, Illig T, Suhre K. Genetics meets metabolomics: a genome-wide association study of metabolite profiles in human serum. PLoS Genet. 2008 Nov;4(11):e1000282. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000282. Epub 2008 Nov 28. PubMed PMID: 19043545; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2581785.
16. Altmaier E, Ramsay SL, Graber A, Mewes HW, Weinberger KM, Suhre K. Bioinformatics analysis of targeted metabolomics–uncovering old and new tales of diabetic mice under medication. Endocrinology. 2008 Jul;149(7):3478-89. doi: 10.1210/en.2007-1747. Epub 2008 Mar 27. PubMed PMID: 18372322.
17. Petersen AK, Zeilinger S, Kastenmüller G, Römisch-Margl W, Brugger M, Peters A, Meisinger C, Strauch K, Hengstenberg C, Pagel P, Huber F, Mohney RP, Grallert  H, Illig T, Adamski J, Waldenberger M, Gieger C, Suhre K. Epigenetics meets metabolomics: an epigenome-wide association study with blood serum metabolic traits. Hum Mol Genet. 2014 Jan 15;23(2):534-45. doi: 10.1093/hmg/ddt430. Epub 2013 Sep 6. PubMed PMID: 24014485; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3869358.
18. Zaghlool SB, Mook-Kanamori DO, Kader S, Stephan N, Halama A, Engelke R, Sarwath H, Al-Dous EK, Mohamoud YA, Roemisch-Margl W, Adamski J, Kastenmüller G,  Friedrich N, Visconti A, Tsai PC, Spector T, Bell JT, Falchi M, Wahl A, Waldenberger M, Peters A, Gieger C, Pezer M, Lauc G, Graumann J, Malek JA, Suhre  K. Deep molecular phenotypes link complex disorders and physiological insult to CpG methylation. Hum Mol Genet. 2018 Mar 15;27(6):1106-1121. doi: 10.1093/hmg/ddy006. PubMed PMID: 29325019; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5886112.
19. Yousri NA, Fakhro KA, Robay A, Rodriguez-Flores JL, Mohney RP, Zeriri H, Odeh  T, Kader SA, Aldous EK, Thareja G, Kumar M, Al-Shakaki A, Chidiac OM, Mohamoud YA, Mezey JG, Malek JA, Crystal RG, Suhre K. Whole-exome sequencing identifies  common and rare variant metabolic QTLs in a Middle Eastern population. Nat Commun. 2018 Jan 23;9(1):333. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-01972-9. PubMed PMID: 29362361; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5780481.
20. Halama A, Kulinski M, Dib SS, Zaghlool SB, Siveen KS, Iskandarani A, Zierer J, Prabhu KS, Satheesh NJ, Bhagwat AM, Uddin S, Kastenmüller G, Elemento O, Gross SS, Suhre K. Accelerated lipid catabolism and autophagy are cancer survival mechanisms under inhibited glutaminolysis. Cancer Lett. 2018 Aug 28;430:133-147.  doi: 10.1016/j.canlet.2018.05.017. Epub 2018 May 17. PubMed PMID: 29777783.