Speaker: Jan Ellenberg, Karolinska Institute
Hosts: Lars- Anders Carlson och Bernt Eric Uhlin
The rapid development of new imaging technologies allows unprecedented insights into the molecular machinery inside living cells and organisms. For the first time, light and electron microscopy have molecular sensitivity and resolving power in situ, and, if used together, can connect structural detail with molecular dynamics of the whole cell. Aided by machine learning driven image analysis powered by open sharing of image data, this provides unprecedented opportunities for new insights into the molecular mechanisms that drive life’s core functions at the scale of the cell.
I will present the progress we have made to study one of life’s most fundamental functions, cell division, by mapping the dynamic protein network, assembly of individual protein complexes and genome re-folding that drive it. Our work has studied cell division in human cancer cells and early mammalian embryos using advanced cross-scale imaging methods, including light-sheet, quantitative fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS)-calibrated, super-resolution and correlative light and electron microscopy. The quantitative integrated molecular data that these new technologies deliver, allow us to better understand how the molecular machinery functions in space and time to ensure faithful cell division and prevent the errors that underlie congenital disease, infertility and cancer.
Jan Ellenberg has been Director of SciLifeLab, Sweden's national research center for molecular biosciences, since 2024. He is also Professor of Cell Biology and Biophysics at Karolinska Institutet and affiliated Professor at Stockholm University and KTH. His research focuses on cell division and the organization of the cell nucleus. Recently, he received support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to launch Alpha Cell, a strategic research programme at SciLifeLab that aims to create a virtual human cell using imaging-based molecular mapping and AI.
Before joining Karolinska Institutet, Jan Ellenberg conducted pioneering cell biology research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. His work has advanced methods for mapping molecular components in living cells using live-cell microscopy, image analysis and computational modelling, providing new insights into fundamental cellular processes.