Laboratory

Biophysics towards quantitative biology

The Biophysics Laboratory develops and applies bionanotechnological tools to image, quantitate and control biological processes. The laboratory was established 2010 at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering of the ETH Zürich in Basel. The laboratory's expertise is highly interdisciplinary and combines molecular and cell biology, biophysics, engineering, and nanotechnology. This expertise is focused towards answering pertinent questions in systems biology and it includes the high-resolution imaging of biological processes from the cellular to the molecular scale, the quantification of the molecular interactions that drive cell biological processes, the manipulation and control of these processes at molecular precision, and the guiding of biological processes in multicellular systems. For a detailed description of our engineering and research activities we kindly refer to Research.

Gap Junctions — Watching native membrane proteins at work. High-resolution AFM topographs of human communication channels changing conformation in response to pH. Gap junctions from left to right were recorded at pH < 6.0, 6.8, 7.2 and > 7.5. Scale bar, 2 nm. Data taken from Yu *et al.* J Biol Chem (2007) 282, 8895-8894.

Controlled mitosis — Mechanical control of mitotic progression. We characterize how human cells mechanically progress through mitosis and use these insights to control mitosis. See Stewart *et al.* Nature (2011) 469, 226–230, Ramanathan *et al.* Nat Cell Biol (2015) 17, 148-159 and Cattin *et al.* PNAS (2015) 112, 11258-11263.