Khallaf is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine. He holds a PhD in chemical biology from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Biology.

In humans, finding a partner is quite a difficult task because there are many criteria that one needs to consider. However, in comparison to many animals, when choosing a partner, we easily discriminate between ourselves and members of other species through different communication systems. On the contrary, many fly species are morphologically similar and overlap in their geographical distributions and ecological habitats. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that they develop unique communication systems to reassure the avoidance of costly interspecific mating. When locating an appropriate mate partner, flies rely on chemical cues – sex pheromones per se. These signals provide the fly partner with a full biography of their potential mate written in scent molecules. How the extraordinarily nervous system evolves to detect these species-specific signals is a fascinating unsolved problem, which shed light into how nervous systems are constructed, function and change. Khallaf's work aims to investigate the evolutionary changes of the neural circuits that underlie species-specific behaviours in an animal’s ecological niche. His PhD results, distributed across more than 10 published articles, did not only examine probably the most important channels of communication between insect species in a completely unprecedented way, but also advanced and changed our understanding of the evolution of neural circuits underlying the reproductive isolation.

Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell– are the link to the world around us. Two of these senses, namely: hearing and touch, rely on ion channels stimulated by mechanical forces. However, despite our profound knowledge of the roles of mechanically activated ion channels, a fundamental question that remains unanswered is how mechanical forces are transmitted to the channel in the first place. Khallaf hypothesizes that the fast force detection by sensory and non-sensory mechanosensitive channels requires mechanical coupling to the extracellular matrix. Elucidating the molecular nature of “tether” proteins that couple matrix to force sensing domains in mechanosensitive channels will give unprecedented access to target mechanotransduction and modulate touch perception for experimental and therapeutic purposes. To rigorously test the above hypothesis, Khallaf is trying to identify the molecular nature of tethers that are necessary for sensory mechanotransduction and examine how these tethers interact with pore forming ion channels.