Honoured: Prof Miki Ebisuya and the stem cell zoo

At TU Dresden, Ebisuya can pursue fundamental research questions about life as a professor for mechanisms of cell and tissue control. One of these has preoccupied her since childhood: where do the major differences in the duration of pregnancies in mice, elephants and humans come from?

Comparing embryos – a challenge

In humans, a pregnancy lasts nine months, in mice 20 days and in elephants almost two years: females of each species carry their offspring for different lengths of time. What determines the pace of biological development? Miki Ebisuya is researching the molecular causes and physical principles behind this mystery. However, in order to be able to compare the embryonic development of different species, their preconditions and living conditions must first be standardised - environmental factors, nutrients, body temperature. That is challenging.

Modelling animal tissue

Miki Ebisuya has found a new, creative solution to get to the bottom of her question: She designed a unique stem cell zoo. The research group leader and her team are using an artificial biosystem of modified cell cultures to research the development of animals. Pluripotent stem cells are used in the test tube – a special type that is not pre-engineered and can develop into any type of cell of an organism. This sometimes results in 3D structures of tissue or organs that simulate a certain stage of development. These synthetic embryo parts can be compared under identical culture conditions and for the first time enable a systematic analysis of the similar developmental time of different species, including humans.

World-leading research at TU Dresden

„It is a great success for TU Dresden to welcome another Humboldt Professor," says Prof Ursula Staudinger, Rector of TU Dresden. „Over the past three years, the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life has been able to attract outstanding international scientists, including the world's leading scientist in synthetic biology." Managing Director and spokesperson of PoL, Prof. Otger Campàs, also emphasises the benefit that Prof. Ebisuya represents for the Cluster of Excellence: „Miki Ebisuya perfectly complements the existing approaches at Physics of Life with her outstanding expertise in the field of synthetic multicellular systems and optogenetics. The many synergies between her group and other PoL groups will lead to innovative approaches to understand the physical principles underlying biological self-organisation. We are very pleased to welcome them to Dresden."

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Dresden biophysics and Japanese children's books

At TU Dresden, interdisciplinary approaches to biological systems are internationally renowned. The Physics of Life Cluster of Excellence in particular bridges the gap between physics and biology. It was therefore an obvious choice for Prof Ebisuya to come to Dresden: „Even when I lived in Japan, I knew the Dresden scientific community because of the many successful examples of co-operation between biology and physics. At the newly established Cluster of Excellence PoL, I want to further promote this type of interdisciplinary collaboration and uncover the biophysical basis of species-specific traits," she explains. Incidentally, the respected researcher received the groundbreaking inspiration for her research in her early youth from a popular science book: "There is a Japanese book entitled Mouse Time and Elephant Time. It explains the differences in developmental time between species, but could not explain why these differences exist at all. This still unanswered question fascinates me. That is why I decided to dedicate my career to precisely this topic“.

über Prof. Miki Ebisuya
Miki Ebisuya completed her doctorate in 2008 in her home country at Kyoto University in Japan, where she subsequently became a research group leader. After a period at the Japanese research institute RIKEN in Kyoto, she moved to EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) in 2018 as a group leader at its newly established site in Barcelona, Spain. She was awarded the Japanese Prize for Excellent Young Researchers in 2019 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2020. For the next five years, Miki Ebisuya will receive a Humboldt Professorship, which she will use to take up the professorship for Mechanisms of Cell and Tissue Control at TU Dresden in April 2023.

The Alexander von Humboldt Professorship
With a value of up to five million euros, the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship is the most highly endowed research award in Germany. The aim of the Humboldt Professorship is to attract top researchers from abroad to Germany. The Humboldt Professorships are each awarded for five years by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.www.humboldt-foundation.de/en

Über das Exzellenzcluster Physics of Life
Physics of Life (PoL) is one of three Clusters of Excellence at TU Dresden. It focuses on identifying the physical laws underlying the organisation of life in molecules, cells and tissues. Physicists, biologists and computer scientists work together in the cluster to investigate how active matter in cells and tissues organises itself into predetermined structures and thus allows life to develop. PoL is funded by the DFG as part of the Excellence Strategy. It is a collaboration between scientists at TU Dresden and research institutions in the DRESDEN-concept network, such as the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS), the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research (IPF) and the Helmholtz Centre Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR). www.physics-of-life.tu-dresden.de

Article from the "Technische Universität Dresden" from 11 May 2023