The CrickConnect team are delighted to be able to invite community members to join us for the institute's regular Crick Lecture.

Crick Lectures provide a broad insight into biomedical research from leading scientists. Not to be missed, the one-hour lectures are the event of the week for the Crick community to come together. The lectures aim to be accessible to scientists across different disciplines, while also offering something for the specialist.

This week, we're delighted to be joined by Dr Ibrahim Cisse from Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, giving the lecture  "Super-resolution imaging of transcription in living cells ".

There will also be an opportunity to catch up with colleagues and friends over refreshments after the Lecture from 17:00. If you are able to join us in person at the Crick please let us know at connect@crick.ac.uk so we can arrange access.

Ibrahim Cisse

Ibrahim was born in Niger and completed his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) in 2009. After a postdoctoral stay at the École Normale Supérieure of Paris (France), he returned to the USA in 2013 to become a Research  specialist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn,Virginia.

In 2014, Ibrahim moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he was first an assistant professor of Physics, then he was promoted to associate professor in the Department of Physics with a joint appointment in biology. Ibrahim joins the MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (USA), where he was appointed Professor of Physics in 2021.

Ibrahim is the recipient of several national and international awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, the Young Fluorescence Investigator Award from the Biophysical Society, The Pew Biomedical Scholars, and the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award.

With his approach of combining physics, biology, and chemistry in one department, he aims to deepen the understanding of how genetic information is decoded. He is researching the behavior of individual molecules and biomolecular phase transitions in living cells that result from so-called weak and transient interactions between molecules. 

Ibrahim will discuss the latest efforts in his laboratory to develop highly sensitive methods of microscopy, to go directly inside living cells and uncover the behavior of single biomolecules as they effect their function in transcription. Transcription is the first step in gene expression regulation, during which genetic information on DNA is decoded into RNA transcripts.Methodologically, the so-called live cell single molecule and super-resolution techniques –that break the optical diffraction limit– are revealing with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions, novel emergent phenomena inside the living cells. We will discuss our recent discoveries on highly dynamic biomolecular clustering, and phase transitions in vivo.These discoveries are challenging the ‘textbook view’ on how our genome (DNA) is decoded in living cells.