Marcin Nowotny

Marcin Nowotny heads the Laboratory of Protein Structure at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IIMCB) in Warsaw. He graduated from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Warsaw in 1997. In 2002 he received a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in the group of prof. Jacek Kuźnicki. Between 2003 and 2008 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland in the group of Dr. Wei Yang. Since 2008, Dr. Nowotny has been leading a group at the IIMCB. His research uses structural biology and protein biochemistry to study the mechanism of enzymes involved in nucleic acid processing. Recent major achievements of his group include elucidation of the mechanism of unique bacterial template- and priming-independent DNA polymerases with anti-phage activity, elucidation of the molecular architecture of RecFOR - a key complex in bacterial homologous recombination,  and determination of structure and mechanism of TnsB transposase from one of the most common bacterial transposons Tn7. Dr. Nowotny's group is also involved in several collaborations with pharmaceutical companies. For example, in collaboration with Ionis Pharmaceuticals, his group described how proteins bind phosphorothioate DNA with enhanced affinity. Marcin Nowotny is a member of EMBO and the Academia Europaea. In 2022, he received the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science - the highest award of its kind in Poland.