Meet us on..

- September 4 - 6: Sanjam will present at the GDCh Wissenschaftforum Chemie (Leipzig) regarding her work on functionalizing lignins.

- July 7: Stephan will give a workshop at the Annual Emmy-Noether Meeting 2023 (Potsdam, Germany) regarding how to set up a junior research group.

2023

28.07.2023

(New Publication) Today, our paper on light-induced conformational changes of azo-lipids, which was joint effort with the labs of Rumiana Dimova (MPIKG Golm) and Joachim Heberle (FU Berlin), was accepted by Advanced Science.

26.07.2023

(Defense) Congratulations to Andrea, who successfully defended her midterm examination in the Physics department and can now enter into the final period of her Master studies.

07.07.2023

(Funding) I'm very honored to announce that I was accepted as a member of DFG's Heisenberg Programme, which allows us to continue our work for additional five years.

03.07.2023

(Presentation) Today, Sanjam presents a poster her work on functionalizing lignins at the 16th International conference on materials chemistry (Dublin, Republic of Ireland) regarding.

31.05.2023

(New Group Member) We welcome Oguzhan Aksu, who will work on his Master thesis in our group in the next 6 months. He will work on functionalizing lignins originating from different sources and on quantifying the permeability of lignin-based hydrogels using our unique equilibrium binding and mobility assays.

12.05.2023

(New Publication) I'm proud to share that today our paper on influenza A virus motility, which was joint effort with the lab of Jurriaan Huskens, was published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (click here). In this work, we use single particle tracking to study the motion of influenza A viruses in the presence of receptor concentration gradients and cleavage activity.

08.05.2023

(New Group Member) We welcome Andre Höck in our group, who will focus in his Bachelor thesis (Biochemistry) on the impact of lipid composition on the reconstitution of transmembrane proteins.

15.04.2023

(New Group Member) A warm welcome to Sophia Schwartz,who starts her doctoral thesis within the IRTG 2662. Sophia will use AFM and our TIRF-based dynamic binding assay to accurately quantify oligovalent protein-polymer interactions. This includes the characterization of isolated protein-polymer complexes as well as protein complexes in the membrane of living cells, the formation of which has been triggered by application of certain polymers.

04.-06.04.2023

(Presentation) Kevin will present a poster at the 18th Zsigmondy Colloquium (Berlin, Germany) regarding his work on tracking the motion of bacteria crossing biohydrogels.

20.02.2023

(Defense) Congratulations to Yannic, who successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled "High-throughput Single-Entity Analysis Methods: From Single-Cell Segmentation to Single-Molecule Force Measurements".

31.01.2023

(New Group Member) We welcome Andrea Lorinczi, who will prepare her Master's thesis (Physics) in our group. She will work with Stephan and perform single particle tracking of membrane-bound proteins, protein aggregates and viruses in order to quantitatively describe the hydrodynamics of supported lipid membranes.

11.01.2023

(Presentation) Today, Stephan will give a talk at the 56st Manfred Eigen Winterseminar in Klosters (Switzerland) highlighting the group's activities on tracking the motion of infectious agents at interfaces and within biological hydrogels.

02.01.2023

(New Group Member) A warm welcome to Oguzhan Aksu, who will do an internship in our group in the next 2 months. He will work with Sanjam on functionalizing lignins originating from different sources.

2022

23.12.2022

(New Publication) Today, Yannic's paper on performing single-molecule force spectroscopy experiments using hydrodynamics was accepted by Small (link). This project, which looks conceptually quite straight forward, turned out to be quite demaning with respect to data analysis and interpretation. But we are very happy about the final outcome, which may provide a very feasible approach to parallelize force measurements at the pN scale.

16.12.2022

(New Group Member) We welcome Ecem Mumcu, who will prepare her Master's thesis (Physical Chemistry) in our group. She will work with Kevin and Stephan and establish a new dynamic binding assay to accurately quantify oligovalent protein-polymer interactions.

14.10.2022

(Funding) Excellent news: Today, the DFG approved additional funding of our Emmy-Noether project, which allows us to continue this work by an additional sixth year.

15.09.2022

Thanks to the support by the Una Europa framework and the Freie Universität Berlin, we organize and host this year's Bionano 2022 workshop on DNA and protein nanoscience. The agenda can be found here.

24.08.2022

(Presentation) Today, Sanjam will give a talk at the ACS Fall 2022 meeting (Chicago, US) regarding her work on "Biomass-derived functional scaffolds for multivalent binding and inhibition of respiratory viruses".

12.07.2022

(Funding) We are happy to announce that Una Europa further supports our initiative "SMART - Smart bionano Materials and Robotic Technologies" by providing funds that allow us to organize a mini-conference on synthetic and biological nanomaschine. This conference will take place at Freie Univerisität on September 15 and 16 and more information will follow soon.

10.06.2022

(Presentation) Stephan presents today the group's activities on "Probing the Interaction of Infectious Agents with Native and Bioinspired Polymers" at the colloquium of the Hereon Institute of Active Polymers (Teltow, Germany).

07.06.2022

(Presentation) Stephan presents at todays opening ceremony of the new research building SupraFAB - "Supramolecular Functional Architectures at Biological Interfaces" and highlight our recent work on tracking the active motion of bacteria through biological hydrogels.

23.05.2022

(Funding) Excellent news: Today, we were informed that Prof. Daniel Schubert's proposal regarding a new confocal microscope was approved by the German Research Foundation. We are proud to be part of this initiative and look forward to the new instrument, which will allow us to perform multispectral imaging with high acquisition rates and spatial resolution.

04.05.2022

(New Group Member) We welcome Hamid Keshmiri, Ph.D., who will collaborate with our group within his Marie Curie fellowship. Hamid is an expert in the fabrication of advanced photonic structures and intends to apply these structures to improve the sensitivity and accuracy of our biophysical assays. In particular, Hamid has an interest in complementing our single-enzyme assay with his structures in order to quantify the action of bacterial efflux pumps, which play an important role in antimicrobial resistance.

11.04.2022

In this week, part of the Bionanointerfaces group will move to the new research building SupraFAB - "Supramolecular Functional Architectures at Biological Interfaces", which will host various groups from the Departments of Biology, Physics, Chemistry and Biochemistry. We are very much looking forward for the interdisciplinary collaborations, which we will be able to do in this excellent environment.

14.03.2022

(New Group Member) A warm welcome to Yi-Ru Liu, who joins our group for an internship (instructed by Katharina). Yi-Ru will extend our single-enzyme assay by establishing pH-sensitive dyes that operate in the red. This is a very interesting and important contribution, as this would allow us to probe light-activated proton pumps and channels, which a very often excited by green light and hence cannot be probed by the green pyranine dye, which we typically use in this assay.

01.01.2022

(New Group Member) We welcome Jan Potthoff, who joins our group for an internship (instructed by Katharina) on the distribution of the protein cytochrome c oxidase in liposomes. To this end, he will label these transmembrane proteins with dyes (prior to reconstitution) and perform step-wise bleaching experiments on protein-containing liposomes (formed by reconstitution of labeled cytochrome c oxidase).

(New Group Member) Furthermore, we welcome our first Master student from the Physics department, José Antonio Flores Gutiérrez, which is a joined supervision with the group of Roland Netz. Antonio will extend our capabilities to perform labelfree optical imaging by establishing neural networks for the analysis of images resulting from scattering microscopy. This is a very complex task, as the point spread function shows non-trivial features (caused by interference effects) and in order to accurately train the neural networks, Antonio will have to implement a model of the imaging process. Afterwards, Antonio will evaluate this model by comparing its outcome with measurements done using well-defined reference beads as well as biological nanoparticles of interest.

2021

01.12.2021

(Funding) We are proud to be part of the Una Europa project "SMART - Smart bionano Materials and Robotic Technologies", for which seed funding was approved today. Within this consortium, several groups across Europe aim to promote our capabilities to generate functional nanomaterials (nanomachines) and to accurately quantify the action of these nanomachines.

05.10.2021

Today, we will have our kick-off meeting of the GRK 2662, at which Stephan will present his work on the "Biophysical characterization of PF4-polyanion interactions"..This is an onsite event and we are happy that many of our Canadian partners were able to join in person.

01.10.2021

(New Group Member) We are proud to announce that Sanjam Chandna, Ph.D., joins our group, who will be funded for the next 2 years by the prestigious Rising Star programme of the Freie Universität Berlin. Sanjam will work on biomass-derived polymers such as lignins and aims to link attachment factors for viruses and bacteria to these polymers in order to generate polymeric virus binding inhibitors having natural precursors. Furthermore, Sanjam will use these functionalized polymers to form hydrogels and quantify their capacity to sequestrate infectious agents.

30.09.2021

(New Group Member) We are very happy that Johann decided to stay in our group and started work on his master thesis, in which he will use our.confocal-based diffusion assay to study the transport of charged molecules into charged hydrogels.

01.09.2021

(New Group Member) We welcome Kevin Diestelhorst, who joins our group as a doctoral student. Kevin will work on project B03 of the CRC 1449, in which he will study the interaction of infectious agents (i.e., viruses and bacteria) with membranes and (biological) hydrogels. In particular, he will use TIRF microscopy to quantify interaction of influenza A viruses with supported lipid bilayers as well as 3D fluorescence microscopy to follow the penetration of mucus by bacteria such as Salmonella typhimurium.

31.08.2021

(Presentation) Stephan presents today at the biannual meeting on tethered membranes (TETHMEM), which takes place as 752. WE-Heraeus-Seminar at the DPG center in Bad Honnef (Germany). He will show Katharinas', Matthias' and Helens work on "Probing Catalytic Activity and Multivalent Interactions Using Optical Microscopy".

06.08.2021

Congratulations to Johann, who finished today his internship by giving a very interesting presentation about the transport of the (positively charged) proteins lysozyme into and within (negatively charged) hydrogels.

24.-27.07.2021

(Presentation) Exciting news: Katharina,Yannic and I will present at the EBSA 2021 meeting (Vienna, Austria) and an associated satellite meeting on protonation dynamics. This is our first oniste conference attendance since Spring 2020 and we are looking forward to meet our colleagues and friends in person.

14.07.2021

(Presentation) Stephan will give a workshop at the Annual Emmy-Noether Meeting 2021, at which we will discuss our experience in setting up junior research groups.

07.05.2021

(Funding) Excellent news: We are proud to be part of the newly approved international graduate research school GRK 2662 "Charging into Future", in which the interaction of proteins with polyelectrolytes will be studied at different levels of complexity and in collaboration with colleagues from McGill university and The University of British Columbia. We will contribute our expertise on probing weak and/or complex interactions down to the single-molecule level.

03.05.2021

Today, Stephan is opponent in the licentiate defense of Erik Olsén at Chalmers University of Technology (Göteborg, Schweden)..

29.04.2021

(Presentation) Stephan presents today the group's activities on "Mobility-Based Quantification of Single Virus-Receptor Interactions" at Healthcare and Life Science & Entrepreneurship, Copenhagen.

22.02.2021

Congratulations to Michael Trump, who finsihed today his internship on the preparation of BMP receptor-containing SLBs and the characterization of such SLBs using single-molecule localization microscopy.

01.01.2021

(New Group Member) We welcome Chuanxiong Nie, Dr. rer. nat., who joins our group as a PostDoc (replacing Kim) and willl use TIRF microscopy to probe the multivalent interaction arising between Corona's spike protein and the ACE2 receptor.

2020

07.12.2020

(Defense) Congratulations to Matthias, who defended today (very successfully) his doctoral thesis on the synthesis and biophysical characterization of high-molecular weight polymeric virus binding inhibitors. Imprressive work!

29.11.2020

(Funding) Excellent news! The "Bionanointerfaces" group received additional funding by the German Research Foundation, allowing us to continue our research project A6 in the Collaborative Research Centre 1078 "Protonation Dynamics in Protein Function". In this project, we will use microfluidics and microscopy to probe the proton turnover of single heme-copper oxidases in dependence of the generated electrochemical gradient. Furthermore, we are proud to be part of the new Collaborative Research Centre 1449 "Dynamic Hydrogels at Biointerfaces", contributing 2 research projects and 1 core project. In the research projects A3 and B3, our group will probe permetaion of viruses and bacteria in synthetic and biological hydrogels and develop new in situ approaches to probe the viscoelastic properties of mucus grown on epithelial cells.

02.11.2020

(New Group Member) A warm welcome to Michael Trump, who will do an internship (instructed by Yannic) on the preparation of BMP receptor-containing SLBs and the characterization of such SLBs using single-molecule localization microscopy. In this way, he will extend our knowledge on the preparation of native material-containing supported lipid bilayers.

06.10.2020

(New Group Member) We welcome Johann again, who will stay in the group for another internship. He will use a newly developed diffusion assay based on confocal fluorescences microscopy to study the transport of small dyes and dye-labeled proteins into charged hydrogels.

05.10.2020

(Presentation) Stephan highlights today Yannic's work on “Probing single-molecule interactions with high throughput using microfluidics” at the Summer School on Microfluidics, DLS/ELS, ITC, held by the BioSupraMol core facility (FU Berlin).

01.10.2020

(New Group Member) We welcome Valentin Reiter-Scherer, Dr. rer. nat., who joins our group as a Visiting PostDoc (from the AG Herrmann, HU Berlin) and willl probe the spike protein-ACE2 interaction using atomic force microscopy-based force spectroscopy.

15.09.2020

(Presentation) Stephan presents today our work on “Probing the activity of heme copper oxidases at the single enzyme level” at the Baltic Redox Workshop (Greifswald).

17.07.2020

(New Group Member) We welcome Kim Silberreis, Dr. rer. nat., who joins our group as a PostDoc and willl use TIRF microscopy to probe the multivalent interaction arising between Corona's spike protein and the ACE2 receptor.

01.07.2020

(Funding) We are proud to participate in the Corona Virus Pre-Exploration Project funded by the Berlin University Alliance. We will extend our TIRF-based assay to probe the multivalent interaction arising between Corona's spike protein and the ACE2 receptor.

19.05.2020

Congratulations to Matthias, who was (as a member of the team CoViCide) awarded within FU's „Research to Market Challenge“ in the category "Translational ideas to fight corona". See the press release here (in German only).

01.05.2020

(New Group Member) We welcome Stefanie Wedepohl, Dr. rer. nat., who joins our group as a PostDoc and willl work on the preparation of native-material containing supported lipid bilayers (SLBs) as well as the motion of SLB-linked viruses under the action of shear forces.

27.03.2020

(Funding) Excellent news: We are very happy and proud to be part of a collaborative research initiative, which is funded by the Berlin University Alliance and aims for developing new therapeutic approaches to treat SARS-Corona Virus-2. We will contribute by translating our assay for quantifying multivalent virus-receptor interactions from Influenza A virus to SARS-Corona Virus-2

25.02.2020

Congratulations to Helen Wildenauer, who successfully finished her internship on resolving transitions between valency states of SV40 virus-like particles.

17.01.2020

(Defense) Congratulations to Johann Plaschke, who successfully finished his internship on the synthesis and functionalization of polymer-based virus binding inhibitors.

08.01.2020

(New Group Member) I'm very happy to welcome back Helen Wildenauer, B.Sc., who already did her B.Sc. thesis in our lab. She will continue her work on the motion of SV40 virus-like particles subject to binding competition or capsid disassembly.

2019

11.-13.12.2019

(Presentation) Katharina, Matthias, and Yannic will present in the following 3 days their latest results as poster contributions to the Biomembrane Days 2019 (Berlin).

28.11.2019

(Presentation) Stephan presents today our work on the quantification of multivalent interactions at the Colloquium of the CRC 803 (Göttingen).

7.-9.11.2019

(Presentation) Yannic will present in the following 3 days his latest results on tracking single receptors in native-like supported lipid bilayers at the Live Cell Single Molecule Tracking Symposium (Ulm).

23.10.2019

(Presentation) Excellent news: Matthias presented today his work on solvent-free polymerization polymer synthesis at the SEPAWA Conference 2019 and received a Poster Award for his contribution.

16.10.2019

(Presentation) Stephan presents today the activities of the Bionanointerfaces group in the Seminar of the Max-Planck Institute of Colloid and Interfaces (Potsdam).

15.03.2019

(New Group Member) We welcome Johann Plaschke, B.Sc., who joins our group for an internship on the synthesis and functionalization of high-molecular weight polymer-based virus binding inhibitors.

02.10.2019

(Presentation) Stephan presents today the activities of the Bionanointerfaces group at the symposium Multivalency in Chemistry and Biology 2019 at the FU Berlin.

23.09.2019

(Presentation) Stephan presents today our work on high-molecular weight, broad-band virus inhibitors and on transport within polymeric hydrogels at the "Hochschullehrer-Nachwuchs-Workshop" of the GDCh in Marl.

30.06.2019

(Presentation) Helen, our former Bachelor student, joins the FEBS Advanced Lecture Course 2019 on Biological Surfaces and Interfaces and presents her work on the quantification of the SV40-GM1 interaction as a poster contribution between June 30 and July 6.

Note added: We congratulate Helen for winning a "Best Poster" award of the FEBS Advanced Lecture Course 2019. Great job!

02.06.2019

Stephan was invited to present the activities of the Bionanointerfaces group at the symposium Multivalency in Chemistry and Biology 2019.

27.05.2019

(Presentation) Great news: Stephan was invited to present our work on high-molecular weight, broad-band virus inhibitors and on transport within polymeric hydrogels at the "Hochschullehrer-Nachwuchs-Workshop" of the GDCh (section macromolecular chemistry).

18.05.2019

Matthias will present his work on high-molecular weight, broad-band virus inhibitors as a poster contribution at the conference Frontiers in Biomedical Polymers 2019.

15.03.2019

(New Group Member) We welcome Katharina Gloria Hugentobler, PhD, who joins our group as PostDoc (currently funded by the Collaborative Research Centre 1078) and who will study the enzymatic proton turnover of heme-copper oxidases at low electron turnover rates.

05.02.2019

(New Publication) Excellent news: Matthias' paper, which extends the equilibrium fluctuation analysis approach by our mobility analysis, was accepted in Nano Letters (link). The paper extracts, for the first time, valency-dependent off-rate distributions of the multivalent interaction occurring between the flu virus (influenza A/X31) and sialic acids and shows how the competition between the 2 influenza spike proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, is modified by the addition of an FDA-approach influenza antiviral. Please see also the highlight in C&EN.

03.02.2019

(Presentation) Stephan will talk today about the activities of the Bionanointerfaces group at the XXI. Linz Winter Workshop as invited speaker.

07.01.2019

(New Group Member) We welcome M.Sc. Yannic Kerkhoff, who joins our group as Doctoral Student (currently funded by the Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation) and who will work on a novel, shear-force-based approach to perform high-throughput spectroscopy measurements while remaining single-molecule sensitivity.

2018

05.10.2018

(New Group Member) We welcome Helen Wildenauer, who joins the group as Bachelor Student and will study the motion of SV40 virus-like particles subject to binding competition or capsid disassembly. This is a very interesting and exciting project, as these approaches may be excellent strategies to continuously decrease the valency of virus-receptor interactions and potentially allow to resolve transitions in the valency state at the level of single viruses.

05.10.2018

(Presentation) Stephan was invited to talk about the activities of the Bionanointerfaces group at the Biosupramol Summer School 2018, focussing on advanced microscopy approaches.

16.09.2018

(Presentation) Stephan presents our work on the quantification of mutlivalent virus-receptor interactions at the Biennnial Meeting of the German Biophysical Society 2018 in Düsseldorf.

28.06.2018

(Funding) Great news! The "Bionanointerfaces" group received additional funding by the German Research Foundation, allowing us to participate with a research project to the Collaborative Research Centre 1078. In this project, we will use microfluidics to control the electron delivery to single heme-copper oxidases (which are reconstituted in liposomes) in order to study the enzymatic proton turnover at low electron turnover rates.

22.05.2018

(New Publication) Stephan's review about membrane hydrodynamic models of suspended and supported lipid bilayers has been published in Biomolecules (link).

02.05.2018

(Presentation) Matthias will give a talk at the "1. International Symposium on Glycovirology 2018" highlighting his recent work on multivalent inhibitors.

27.04.2018

(New Group Member) We welcome Lisa Glinzig, who joins the group as Bachelor Student and who will work on developing new approaches to study virus capsid disassembly at biointerfaces.

12.03.2018

(New Publication) Stephan's paper combining nanoplasmonics, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, and burst autocorrelation analysis has been published in ACS Nano (link). He will present his findings in a talk at the DPG Spring Meeting 2018 taking place in Berlin.

2017

15.12.2017

(Funding) We received an early Christmas Gift by the Focus Area Nanoscale, who will support a research project aiming to improve the sensitivity in virus detection using capsid disassembly processes.

09.10.2017

(Funding) Great news! The "Bionanointerfaces" group is now associated member of the Collaborative Research Centre 1078, supporting our research activities in the field of quantifying turnover rates of single heme-copper oxidases.

07.08.2017

(Presentation) Stephan is among the invited speakers of the Tethered Membranes 2017 conference in Vienna and will present his work on the quantification of virus-receptor and lipid-lipid interactions.

24.07.2017

(Presentation) Matthias will present his work on multivalent inhibitors by providing a poster contribution to the "Mucins in Health and Disease" conference taking place in Cambridge UK.

19.06.2017

(Funding) Excellent news! The group "Bionanointerfaces" is now part of the Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation, providing up to 1.3 Mio € over 5 years to support our research activities in the field of multivalent interactions and massive parallelization of single-molecule force spectroscopy.

01.04.2017

(New Group Member) We welcome M.Sc. Ömer Akay, who joins our group as Research Associate (currently funded by the Focus Area Nanoscale) and who will combine nanoplasmonics and spectroscopy to improve the sensitivity of virus biosensors.

01.01.2017

(New Group Member) Happy New Year! We welcome M.Sc. Matthias Müller, who joins our group as doctoral student (currently funded by the Research Training Group of the CRC 765) and who will work on the quantification of multivalent virus-receptor interactions and their modification by addition of multivalent inhibitors. He will start his endeavour with an research stay in the group of Jay Kizhakkedathu.

2016

23.09.2016

(Publication) Stephan's paper introducing a new approach for accurate size determination of biological nanoparticles (termed 2D flow nanometry) has been published in Nature Communications (link).

31.05.2016

(Publication) Stephan's paper on the mobility-based quantification of multivalent interactions has been published in Nano Letters (link).

17.05.2016

(Funding) Great news! The "Bionanointerfaces" group is now associated member of the Collaborative Research Centre 765, providing funds to support some of our research activities.