Principal investigator
Michael Ratz
Lineage tracing combined with single-cell and spatial readouts.
Ratz leads the Developmental Neurogenomics group in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, which he started in 2023, asking how neural circuits assemble and how mutations in risk genes derail that process into neurodevelopmental disorders.
He pioneered TREX, for TRacking and gene EXpression, which writes heritable barcodes into cells in the embryonic brain and reads them out alongside single-cell transcriptomes, so that lineage and cell identity are recovered from the same cells. Space-TREX extends this with spatial transcriptomics, recovering lineage, expression and position together across whole tissue sections (Nat Neurosci 2022). He went on to co-develop Perturb-TREX, which adds genetic perturbation to clonal tracing.
His earlier work was in a different field entirely: a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Göttingen on super-resolution microscopy, including CRISPR/Cas9 endogenous protein tagging for RESOLFT imaging of living human cells.
He then did postdoctoral research with Jonas Frisén at Karolinska Institutet and Joakim Lundeberg at KTH, where the clonal tracing work began. He teaches at BSc and MSc level and directs a doctoral course on single-cell lineage tracing.