Tanja Mittag received her Ph.D. from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, where she studied protein-ligand interaction mechanisms with Ulrich Guenther using line shape analysis and relaxation dispersion NMR techniques. She then went to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and characterized the highly dynamic complex between Sic1 and Cdc4 in Julie Forman-Kay's laboratory, in collaboration with Lewis Kay. Multiple phosphorylation sites in Sic1 interact, one at a time, with the one binding pocket in Cdc4, leading only to transient ordering of directly bound motifs while the rest of Sic1 remains disordered. This dynamic complex is crucial for regulating cell cycle progression in an ultrasensitive manner and may aid in "counting" phosphorylation sites through poly-electrostatic interactions.
Tanja Mittag has been an Assistant Member in the Structural Biology Department at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis since 2010 and has received a V Foundation Scholar Award. Her lab studies the function of dynamic and disordered protein complexes, in particular the roles they play in the formation of membrane-less cellular organelles.