Thomas F. Meyer PhD

Thomas Meyer during his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Thomas F. Meyer started his career by establishing an in vitro replication system of bacteriophage fd. In 1980 he became interested in mobile elements and began pioneering investigations of the molecular basis of pilin antigenic variation in Neisseria with Prof. M. So at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Public Research Institute, New York, as a postdoctoral fellow.

He was back in Heidelberg as a staff scientist at ZMBH (Centre for Molecular Biology of Heidelberg University) in 1982, he discovered the first example of variable gene expression based on the variation of short repeats (slipped strand mispairing). After moving to MPI for Biology, Tübingen, he discovered neisserial IgA protease as the first example of the large family of bacterial autotransporter proteins and explored its secretory pathway.