Lab News & Events

(2/2) We are equally happy to welcome Juan, a MSc Biophysics student at Humboldt University, to join us for his thesis work on nanoscale chromatin tracing and technical advances of tkPAINT. We wish both of you fantastic start!

(1/2) Exciting week - two new students join the team! Jana, a BSc Biology student at Humboldt University is joining us for her thesis work on super-resolution imaging of nascent RNA.

Following the successful setup of our TIRF microscope, we celebrated together with all the colleagues who contributed along the way — from planning and procurement to transport, renovations, and infrastructure.
Thank you all for your support in making this possible!
(Of course, we couldn’t resist a cake showing our first resolved 20 nm DNA origami grid.)

The lab is growing slowly but steadily and we warmly welcome our new intern Katharina! We wish you a successful and insightful time with us and are excited to see where your sample preparation optimization screens are leading!

Every beginning starts small! After 9 years Johannes is back at the optical table, assembling mirrors, posts and lasers to what’s to become the laser launch of our TIRF microscope.

Our study on the benefits of sodium sulfite + trolox (SST) as oxygen scavenger for DNA-PAINT imaging - now out in Small!
Congratulations, Becky, on your PhD’s first paper - and thank you for the fun joint work in the Church lab at Harvard Medical School.

• Read the paper: R. T. Perelman, G. M. Church, and J. Stein, “A Simple, Ultrastable, and Cost-Effective Oxygen-Scavenging System for Long-Term DNA-PAINT Imaging.” Small (2025): e09092
• Johannes’ Bluetorial

Johannes presented our research at the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMFTR) following an invitation from minister Dorothee Bär, as part of the Global Minds Initiative - through which we are grateful to receive our funding.

• LinkedIn post
• BMFTR press release
• Conference recording

Impressed by a fantastic set of talks by our early career researchers at our institute’s Day of Science 2025. We had a lot of fun helping to organize the event, discussing our research and getting to know everyone better. Stay tuned for some scientific art work..!

Congratulations again, Anja Hess from the Meissner Lab, on a well deserved Best Talk Award!

While ordering reagents, equipment and, most importantly, our TIRF microscope, we are lucky to have hit the ground running in our temporary space with the Herrmann Lab, taking cell culture into ops and starting to establish our cryosectioning workflows (see Sandra’s first sections on the left!). Massive thanks to all colleages, scientific and non-scientific staff, the support is incredible!

Sandra becomes the first lab member and joins us as a highly skilled technician! Excited for our joint work, the discoveries lying ahead of us and grateful to have you on board!

Johannes has been awarded an Emmy Noether Grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and will establish his independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. His project “Decoding the molecular principles of nuclear organization via multiplexed nanoscopy”, is supported by €2 million in funding over six years.