From structural architecture to cellular organization: celebrating the scientific contributions of Ueli Aebi on the occasion of his retirement.
Venue: Journal of structural biology

This Special Issue, comprising articles from 21 different research groups, is a Festschrift dedicated to Ueli Aebi on the occasion of his retirement from the Biozentrum at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Over the last 26 years, Ueli has served as Founding Director and Professor of the Maurice E. Müller Institute for Structural Biology. During this time, Ueli’s infectious ‘‘simplicity is key to success’’ dogma and collaborative inter-disciplinary spirit has influenced many laboratories all over the world, going far beyond his 300 journal articles and reviews that have amassed almost 16,000 citations thus far. The ‘‘integrated approach,’’ to use another Ueli-ism, is one visionary characteristic that sets him apart from the egocentrism of classical ‘‘Narcissus-type’’ research. Ueli Aebi studied physics and mathematics at the University of Bern from 1967 to 1972. As destiny would not have it, a gamechanging discussion with the preeminent orthopedic surgeon (and his then future father-in-law) Maurice E. Müller lured Ueli away from pursuing a Ph.D. in theoretical physics with the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman instead re-focusing his gaze onto ‘‘real’’ problems i.e., the life sciences. This led Ueli to the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, where his sidetrack into biology was to be irrevocably cemented. There, he went under the tutelage of world-renowned phage biologist and electron microscopist Eduard Kellenberger who at the time had just cofounded the Biozentrum. Ueli, ever the prodigious prankster, had published an astounding 15 papers by the time he obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1977. Then with a Swiss career development award in hand, Ueli and his wife Janine Aebi-Müller moved with their three small children to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he worked as a Senior Research Associate for two years. The family subsequently moved again this time to Baltimore where Ueli rose from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine between 1979 and 1986. It was at Johns Hopkins where he began his lifelong work with the basic molecular components that govern cell structure in metazoan cells. Among Ueli’s notable contributions, his structure-based functional approach to crack biological problems has led to fundamental advances in our understanding of amyloid fibrillogenesis, intermediate filaments, the nuclear lamina and the nuclear pore complexes that facilitate nucleocytoplasmic transport. Then in 1985, together with his colleague Andreas Engel, Ueli responded to a call to establish a structural biology division at the Biozentrum – the Maurice E. Müller Institute for Structural Biology. Fast forward 26 years, Ueli’s signature ‘‘hybrid methods’’ approach that integrates cutting-edge electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy and a host of other techniques ranging from X-ray crystallography to protein design and nanoscience methodologies has not only made a profound impact in biology, but has