PhD-student (all gendes) – Protein Biochemistry and MINFLUX Super-Resolution Microscopy

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is one of the world's leading organizations for application-oriented research. 75 institutes develop pioneering technologies for our economy and society – more precisely: 32 000 people from technology, science, administration and IT. They know: Anyone who comes to Fraunhofer wants to and can make a difference. For themselves, for us and for the markets of today and tomorrow.

The High Resolution and Automated Microscopy department is part of the Fraunhofer Translational Neuroinflammation and Automated Microscopy TNM, the Göttingen site of the Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology ITMP.

Our primary focus at the Fraunhofer TNM is on testing, refining, and establishing state-of-the-art super-resolution microscopy techniques in the context of biologically and disease-relevant questions. We apply these advanced imaging technologies to clinically meaningful model systems in order to evaluate their robustness, scalability, and added value for translational research. By combining super-resolution microscopy with genome editing and advanced image analysis, we systematically assess how these methods can reveal disease-associated cellular phenotypes at unprecedented spatial resolution.
Working in close collaboration with clinicians and industry partners, our goal is to validate and standardize these technologies so that they become fully implementation-ready for future drug discovery and pharmacological research. Among these approaches, MINFLUX represents a particularly powerful recent development. MINFLUX is a revolutionary microscopy technique that enables unprecedented optical and temporal resolution. Recent research has shown that this method is particularly well suited for analyzing protein motion, for example, in mitochondrial membranes. This project aims to use state-of-the-art 3D MINFLUX tracking to follow singly labeled sparse cargo proteins in living cells and study their transport to and import through the TOM complex.