Dr. Michael Krieg leads the Neurophotonics and Mechanical Systems Biology group at the Institute of Photonics Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona. After a 6-year postdoc at Stanford University, Dr. Krieg landed at ICFO in 2017 with a Starting Grant from the ERC. During his career, Dr. Krieg has mainly focused in the use of AFM to study the mechanics of cells, with a particular interest in mechanosensation and -transduction.

With the help of a FEDER grant, Dr. Krieg’s lab co-funded a SENSOCELL optical tweezers system from IMPETUX integrated with spinning disk confocal microscopy. The combination of these two modalities is unique and sparks many different collaborations between biologists, microscopists and physicists from many different institutes.

The unique force measuring capabilities of SENSOCELL offer Dr. Krieg the possibility to address fundamental questions about the mechanobiology of cells. In a recent research [1], his group has shown the potential of IMPETUX’s technology to characterize the mechanical properties of nuclei inside suspended and confined cells. The flexibility of system is also key in the cell membrane tension experiments carried out by the group, where they study the interplay between mechanical forces and calcium signalling in neurons.