 A prerequisite for the understanding of the fundamental processes of life is the knowledge of the structure of the participating macromolecules.Two of the four Departments are devoted to the challenging task of determining the structure of membrane proteins.Under the direction of Hartmut Michel (Nobel Prize in Chemistry of 1988 for the first structure determination of a membrane protein), the Department of Molecular Membrane Biology approaches this problem primarily by x-ray crystallography, whereas the Department of Structural Biology, headed by Werner Kühlbrandt, uses the complementary technique of electron microscopy.