Congratulation to successful PhD Defense

On September 20, 2022 Raphaela Seeger, student of the PhD program Cutting Edge Microscopy (CEM) has successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled "Investigating synaptic vesicle exocytosis by structural studies of rat synaptosomes". 

During this project synapses were isolated and treated with an exocytosis triggering solution prior to vitrification by plunge freezing to achieve a temporal resolution and investigate the morphofunctional changes in the synapses' architecture via cryo-electron tomography. In parallel, tomograms of synapses with a mutated exocytosis-relevant-molecule (SNAP25) from collaborators (University of Copenhagen) were evaluated and compared with the results of the time-resolved exocytosis events. Further, a deep-learning software to automate the segmentation of synaptic vesicles was created in a collaboration with another PhD student from the Zuber lab.