B CUBE Junior Research Group
'Bionanotechnological Analysis and Manipulation'

 

You can find more details about the Schlierf-lab here.

 

Our team is interested in the development and application of various single-molecule tools to study the function of various biomachines primarily in vitro and on a longer timescale in vivo. We are using well-established single-molecule techniques like single-molecule force and fluorescence spectroscopy. In order to maximize the information on how these intriguing machines work, we will combine force and fluorescence spectroscopy.

 

About

Michael Schlierf studied Physics during his undergraduate time at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and Université Paris-Sud, Orsay. He became addicted to the beauty of single-molecules during his undergraduate research exchange to Julio M Fernández’ lab at Columbia University, NYC. Then he joined for his Diploma and PhD thesis the lab of Matthias Rief at TU München and focused on protein folding studies with the help of single-molecule force spectroscopy. He received his PhD in July 2008.
After a short postdoc in Munich, he joined the lab of Taekjip Ha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in October 2008 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. At UIUC he expanded his single-molecule skills by fluorescence based techniques, like single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) in order to study DNA interacting molecules. He started his junior research group in B CUBE in Fall 2010. Contact details

 

Selected publications:

  1. Fluorescence-Force Spectroscopy at the Single-molecule Level (2010), Ruobo Zhou, Michael Schlierf and Taekjip Ha, Methods in Enzymology
  2. Insight into Helicase Mechanism and Function Revealed through Single-Molecule Approaches (2010), Jaya G Yodh, Michael Schlierf and Taekjip Ha, Quarterly Review in Biophysics
  3. Direct Observation of Active Protein Folding Using Lock-in Force Spectroscopy (2007), Michael Schlierf, Felix Berkemeier and Matthias Rief, Biophysical Journal
  4. Surprising simplicity in the Single-Molecule Folding Mechanics of Proteins (2009), Michael Schlierf and Matthias Rief, Angewandte Chemie International Edition
  5. Single Molecule Unfolding Force Distributions Reveal a Funnel-Shaped Energy Landscape (2006), Michael Schlierf and Matthias Rief, Biophysical Journal