Dr Jacomine Krijnse Locker (Heidelberg University)
"Electron tomography to study the membrane assembly of large DNA viruses"
Biography:
Dr Jacomine Krijnse Locker obtained her PhD in virology and cell biology in 1994 at the university of Utrecht, the Netherlands. She moved to the European molecular biology laboratory, Cell Biology and Biophysics program, in Heidelberg, Germany where she worked on the cell biology of poxviruses. She used mostly modern microscopy techniques and increasingly also electron microscopy (EM). At the EMBL she was exposed to state of the art imaging techniques, such as electron tomography (ET) and cryo-EM of vitreous sections. This enable her group to conclude that the poxvirus envelope is a single open membrane, created from open membrane intermediates, that likely result from virus-induced membrane rupture. In 2007 she moved to the university of Heidelberg and heads its EM facility since 2009. She continues her work on large DNA viruses using predominantly EM and ET. The goal is to identify common factors that mediate their unconventional membrane assembly from open membrane intermediates. Besides following her own research interest she is also involved in supervising EM analyses of other viruses such as HIV-1, HCV and Denguevirus.