Prof. Dr. Carsten Sachse

I am the director of the Ernst-Ruska-Centre 3 for Structural Biology at the Forschungszentrum Jülich as well as a professor at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf. I was a group leader at the EMBL from 2010 – 2018. I got in touch with electron cryomicroscopy by studying amyloid fibrils in the groups of Marcus Fändrich (now in Ulm, Germany) and Niko Grigorieff (now at UMASS Medical School, University of Massachusetts , USA).For my postdoctoral period, I went to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK) to work with Richard Henderson and Roger Williams. In the last few years, we set up a group to study the mechanisms of autophagy by electron cryomicroscopy. Traditionally, I have been interested in the advancement of high-resolution single-particle EM with a particular focus on helical reconstruction. These developments have led to our recent helical processing software package Spring. More recently, we became interested in improving means of cryo-EM map interpretation by atomic models. We use and apply these powerful cryo-EM methods to study the membrane biology of autophagy and ESCRT machinery proteins.