Friedrich Miescher Laboratory

Interdisciplinary career jump-board

The Friedrich Miescher Laboratory (FML) is a research institute of the Max Planck Society named after Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss physician who discovered DNA in Tübingen. The FML is part of the Max Planck Campus Tübingen, which is also home to the Max Planck Institutes for Biology Tübingen, for Biological Cybernetics and for Intelligent Systems. The research groups at the FML are currently working on various aspects of biology.

Research groups

Structural Regeneration
Max Planck Research Group Leader: Can Aztekin

Why do only a few species regenerate their limbs? How do these animals restore a lost limb? What is different in mammals? To answer these, we focus on characterizing cell types of limbs by following a comparative approach between regeneration-competent tadpoles and regeneration-incompetent mice. more
Synthetic Biology Approaches to Pattern Formation
Max Planck Research Group Leader: Beatrice Ramm

Our group contributes to the understanding of pattern formation in biology with an interdisciplinary approach that sits at the interface of biochemistry, biophysics and synthetic (developmental) biology. more
Evolutionary Genomics of Complex Traits
Max Planck Research Group Leader: Luisa F. Pallares

Our research focuses on understanding the genetic basis of between-individual variation in complex traits and how such complex genetic architectures, instead of being static properties of a trait, get re-shaped when populations are exposed to different environments (genotype-by-environment interactions or GxE). In addition, we are particularly interested in understanding how phenotypic robustness is regulated in such traits. That is, we aim to understand not only why individuals in a population look different from each other, but also why some individuals are more vulnerable than others when exposed to perturbations like stressful or new environments. more
Structural Biochemistry of Meiosis
Max Planck Research Group Leader: John Weir

We are engaged in biochemical studies that enable the crossing of genetic information in the test tube with synthetic DNA. For this, we will increasingly be able to use hybrid structural biological approaches and combine different methods to obtain as complete a picture as possible of the systems of interest to us. In doing so, we aim to address phenomena specific to vertebrate and, in particular, human meiosis. In the long term, we hope that our work could be of use to clinicians helping people with fertility problems or genetic diseases. more
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