The MPI-CBG building at night.

Which would be a shame, Shevchenko adds, because the surrounding city of Dresden is quite energetic and worth visiting.

Of course, there is plenty of energy in the lab as well, as can be expected from a field like proteomics that has been rapidly advancing; technical issues that were bottlenecks just two years ago have been resolved, notes Shevchenko, who can follow advances closely as an editorial board member for the ASBMB journal, Molecular and Cellular Proteomics.

“The “omic” sciences are becoming much more quantitative than descriptive now,” he says, “and we are really beginning to understand the molecular aspects of these proteins, complexes or networks that we study. In addition to pure numbers, proteomics also has moved forward by now being able to track measurements in both time and space, which is especially exciting.”

Shevchenko is hoping to use these new advances to tackle an ambitious project aimed at marrying lipidomics with developmental biology. As organisms grow and develop from a single cell, newly differentiated tissues require their own unique membrane lipid composition, and Shevchenko hopes to characterize these tailored changes to better understand how inherited defects in lipid metabolism cause disease.

And, to think, a few years ago, lipids was just another dirty word.