Petra Schwille receives Carl Zeiss Lecture 2020
The German Society for Cell Biology (DGZ) and ZEISS honor Petra Schwille, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, with the Carl Zeiss Lecture. With this award, the DGZ internationally acknowledges her major contributions to Cell Biology, in particular the introduction of fluorescence cross correlation spectroscopy for understanding fundamental aspects of life.
What is the minimum equipment required by the cell as the smallest living unit in an organism? Petra Schwille is looking into this question with her department "Cellular and Molecular Biophysics". Together they aim to (re)construct cellular processes and ultimately minimal living cells from dramatically simplified functional subsystems such as proteins and protein assemblies. The microscope is not sufficient to observe the interactions between the single, tiny molecules in the cell and the processes underlying them. The Biophysicist has therefore developed the fluorescence cross correlation spectroscopy, a method which visualizes processes in and around the cell. This method allows to analyze the dynamics and interactions of fluorescence-labeled molecules with highest resolution down to the level of single molecules.