Irina Gutsche University Grenoble Alpes CNRS Institute of Structural Biology Grenoble France

Hereby we wish to apply for nomination of Irina Gutsche, University of Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Institute of Structural Biology, Grenoble, France for a visiting professorship at Umeå University for a period of 12 months starting from January 2023.

IG has already established collaborations with the groups of Linda Sandblad (LS) and Lars-Anders Carlson (LAC) in the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS). She will be active at the Department of Chemistry and hosted by LS and the Umeå Centre for Electron Microscopy (UCEM).

She will bring her cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and image analysis expertise to UCEM and work together with its staff on the optimisation of sample preparation and automation of the cryo-ET data acquisition at the UCEM Titan Krios microscope.

IG and her group members will also share their computational tools for cryo-ET tilt series alignments, 3D reconstructions, volume visualisation and manipulation, and seamless integration between different existing software packages, and will provide training to UCEM users.

The structural biology projects she is bringing to MIMS are interesting to several local groups and will foster new ideas, developments and collaborations.

We are convinced that IG nomination will contribute to the current international effort of establishment of cryo-ET as a valuable tool for integrative cell biology and answer important questions in structural microbiology.