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Gaudenz Danuser

Education

Ph.D. Electrical Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
M.Sc. Measurement Sciences, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Research interest

We are interested how cell decisions are preconditioned by the organization of cell surface receptors. Critical questions to be addressed include, how does the clustering of receptors in homo- and hetero-complexes influence signal transduction, what mechanisms control the receptor landscape at the cell surface, and how many receptors need to be activated to elicit a robust downstream signal in the cytoplasm. To study these questions we combine super-resolution single molecule imaging with mathematical modeling of receptor dynamics. A peculiar challenge of this work is that single molecule images provide only a small statistical sub-sample of an intrinsically stochastic process. Also, the imaging is limited to one or two receptor types at the time whereas receptor clusters may include many more types. Novel numerical methods are being developed for the calibration of stochastic models by scarce random measurements in order to extrapolate the continuum behavior of multiplex receptors. We focus these studies on the interactions among ErbB1-4 and between the ErbB receptor family, IGFR, and c-Met.

CDP-related publications

Sabouri M., Wu Y., Hahn K., and Danuser G. Visualizing and quantifying adhesive signaling. Curr. Opinion in Cell Biology. 20(5):541-50 2008.

Jaqaman K., Loerke D., Mettlen M., Kuwata H., Grinstein S., Schmid S. and Danuser G., Robust single particle tracking in live cell time-lapse sequences. Nat. Methods 5: 695 – 702. 2008.

Jaqaman K. and Danuser G. Linking data to models: data regression. Nature Rev. Mol. Cell Biol. 7:813 – 819. 2006.