The overall topic of the institute is the structural basis for affinity and specificity of protein ligand interactions. What determines the strength and the specificity of an interaction? What does a ligand look like to bind its target and to be released again reversibly? And how must an artificial ligand look like to successfully compete with all physiological ligands, whether reversibly or not. An important point in our investigations, of course, is to determine the three-dimensional structures of the proteins under investigation and their complexes with the respective ligands at high resolution. At the end, we want to understand all determinants for affinity and specificity of protein ligand interactions in a qualitative and quantitative way. Further, we want to be able to manipulate these interactions in a target specific way.