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Research in the Wollweber group
The Wollweber group develops and applies multi-scale imaging methods – such as cryo-electron tomography and expansion microscopy – to decipher the cell biology of non-model organisms and understand the evolution of complex life.
AMBER postdoctoral fellowship project (final call)
Next generation vitrification workflows for cryo-ET - Enabling high-throughput cryo-imaging across the microbial tree of life
Cryo-electron tomography (cryoET) enables the visualization of cellular ultrastructure in a near-native state and provides structural information in situ, making it a powerful discovery tool for microbial cell biology. However, its application to a large variety of species in a high-throughput manner is hindered by the fact that sample preparation, i.e. vitrification and thinning by focused ion beam (FIB) milling, must be adapted for each sample type. A second major bottleneck is the limited number of samples that can be processed per experiment. Recent methodological advancements, such as micropatterning of grids and serial-lift out cryo-FIB-SEM, have greatly increased the throughput for mammalian cells and tissues. Similar technological breakthroughs are absent for bacteria, archaea and microbial eukaryotes.
The fellow will join the Wollweber group at EMBL Grenoble (https://www.embl.org/groups/wollweber/) to address these challenges by developing next-generation sample preparation workflows that 1) standardize vitrification across diverse microbial species and 2) enable multiplexed preparation of different samples on a single EM grid. To this end, we propose to integrate microfluidic encapsulation of microbes with jet vitrification and (correlative) cryoFIB/ET imaging. The resulting workflow would allow high-throughput processing of phylogenetically and physiologically diverse microbes in a multiplexed manner, enabling comparative studies of cellular architecture at scale.
Location: EMBL, Grenoble, France
Organisation: EMBL, Grenoble
Links
Read more about the Florian Wellweber group
AMBER call in EURAXESS main call (starting point for application)