EPFL School of Life Sciences - 2009 Annual Report
IBI - Co-affiliated Research Group - School of Engineering (STI)
Maerkl Lab Head of Lab (PI) - http://lbnc.epfl.ch
Team Members
Sebastian Maerkl
Matthew Blackburn, PhD Student Nicolas Denervaud, PhD Student Luis Miguel Fidalgo, Postdoctoral fellow Jose Garcia-Cordero, Postdoctoral Fellow Marcel Geertz, Postdoctoral Fellow Bin He, PhD Student (Co-advised, Kreitman Lab, U. Chicago) Henrike Niederholtmeyer, PhD Student Jean-Bernard Nobs, PhD Student Tatjana Petrov, PhD Student Arun Rajkumar, PhD Student Sylvie Rockel, PhD Student Helen Chong, Administrative Assistant Viktoria Stepanova, Masters Student
Tenure Track Assistant Professor STI
Research Interests
In January of 2008 Prof. Maerkl established the Laboratory of Biological Network Characterization (LBNC) at the EPFL. The LBNC is principally interested in developing highly integrated microfluidic devices and applying these to pertinent problems in biology. Of particular interest to the lab at the moment is systems biology, which will benefit tremendously from the development of novel, high-throughput technologies. We are actively developing high-throughput methods for single cell analysis in S.cerevisiae and S.pombe, as well as M.smegmatis in collaboration with the McKinney Lab (SV/GHI). Using these methods we are interested in characterizing global protein expression dynamics on the single cell level (S.cerevisiae), understand how genotypic variants affect fitness (S.pombe), and discover leads towards understanding and possibly counteracting bacterial persistence (M.smegmatis). The lab is also interested in understanding transcriptional regulatory networks by developing and characterizing promoter variants in vivo, as well as through the biophysical characterization of transcription factors in vitro. We are additionally interested in synthetic biology, for which we are developing novel microfluidic methods. Prof. Maerkl also co-advises the annual EPFL iGEM team/ project course, which participates at a synthetic biology competition at MIT.
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Selected publications
Maerkl, S.J. and S.R. Quake (2009). “Experimental Determination of the evolvability of a transcription factor.” PNAS 106(44): 18650-5. Maerkl, S. (2009). “Integration column: Microfluidic highthroughput screening.” Integrative Biology 1(1): 19-29. Huang, L., S. J. Maerkl and O. J. F. Martin (2009). “Integration of plasmonic trapping in a microfluidic environment.” Optics Express 17(8): 6018-6024. Gerber, D., S. J. Maerkl and S. R. Quake (2009). “An in vitro microfluidic approach to generating protein-interaction networks.” Nature Methods 6(1): 71-4. Einav, S., D. Gerber, P. D. Bryson, E. H. Sklan, M. Elazar, S. J. Maerkl, J. S. Glenn and S. R. Quake (2008). “Discovery of a hepatitis C target and its pharmacological inhibitors by microfluidic affinity analysis.” Nature Biotechnology 26(9): 1019-1027. Maerkl, S. J. and S. R. Quake (2007). “A systems approach to measuring the binding energy landscapes of transcription factors.” Science 315(5809): 233-237. Thorsen, T., S. J. Maerkl and S. R. Quake (2002). “Microfluidic large-scale integration.” Science 298(5593): 580584.
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