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
Research Group Leader: Dr. 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.
Research Group Leader: Dr. 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.
