Department Cell Biology of the Skin

The Department of Cell Biology of the Skin – AG Niessen aims at understanding how regulation of cell structure determines the shape and function of epithelial barriers. We ask how regulators of cell architecture integrate with signals that control metabolism, inflammation and growth to control the formation and maintenance of the multilayered epidermal skin barrier and how alterations in these biomechanical networks result in disease.

Mission of the lab: Understanding how cell shape determines tissue function

The Niessen laboratory aims at understanding how adhesion, mechanical and biochemical signals integrate to establish and regenerate stratifying epithelial barriers. The explicit aim is to understand how these signals coordinate cell shape, fate and position within the tissue. We focus on the skin epidermis as this provides a paradigm for spatial separation of differentiation states in distinct compartments.

Research projects

Lab-News

lab retreat 2024

At the beginning of March, we organized a group retreat to consolidate the mission of the working group and discuss the progress of the individual projects. Everyone presented their research and the…

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December 2023: Congratulations on your Ph.D defense, Dr Aiswarya Bhosale!

I am happy to announce that I successfully defended my Ph.D. defense, focusing on the interaction between actin and spectrin networks in epidermal barrier formation. Throughout my doctoral research,…

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Successful defense of the master's thesis

I successfully completed my master’s thesis defence regarding the mechanistic insight in epidermal adherens junction communication to mechanical stress protection. Throughout the one-year research, we…

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congratulations

Congratulations to our medical student Lukas Koch, who won the FOR5504 MD fellowship!

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