The LMB is delighted to announce the appointment of Sven Truckenbrodt, who will join the Neurobiology Division in October 2025 to lead a research group harnessing molecular connectomics to investigate neural wiring.
The brain is at the centre of all our lived experience. To better understand this organ researchers are striving to curate increasingly complex connectomes, high resolution maps which detail all the connections in the brain. Naturally, this requires an abundance of information. Sven’s group will develop and apply the new paradigm of molecular connectomics to generate this information, combining synaptic resolution circuit mapping with traditional molecular biology techniques.
Harnessing expansion microscopy, Sven will use hydrogels to expand biological tissues. This separates biological features and increases resolution, allowing conventional light microscopes to map brains at synaptic resolution. Utilising light microscopy means Sven can apply conventional molecular techniques to better examine brain tissue, such as immunostaining synaptic markers and viral barcoding of neurons. Using multimodal multiplexing, Sven aims to combine these tools to analyse several targets and biomolecules within the same brain connectome. Ultimately, this will allow for a better understanding of the neural basis of animal behaviour.
Sven commented, “mapping the brain on the molecular level promises a new understanding of our minds, behaviour, and mental health conditions — and I can’t think of a better place to pursue this research than among the community of outstanding connectomics scientists fostered by the LMB’s unique culture of bold blue sky science!”
Sven began his research career with a PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of Göttingen. Here, he invented X10, the first one-step expansion microscopy method capable of volumetrically expanding brain tissue over 1,000-fold. He also developed tools for long-term tracking of synaptic vesicle activity and worked on the first quantitative model of a synapse which featured over 300,000 proteins. As a postdoc at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), Sven expanded the capabilities of expansion microscopy to better meet needs for multiplexing, super-resolution and sample processing and used these tools to examine plants.
More recently, Sven has served as Lead Scientist in Molecular Connectomics at E11 Bio, a non-profit Focused Research Organisation (FRO) designed to enable ambitious research on a prespecified, public goods project. In this position, Sven led a team that has developed tools to generate large-scale datasets using brain expansion microscopy and multiplexed optical readouts of viral barcoding, morphology and molecular markers.