Group History

Within the last 11 years we have established not only a new group, but also two new research directions at the J. Heyrovsky Institute, as well as within the Czech Republic.

Firstly, our group is a leading group in the field of development of fluorescence techniques and their application in biosciences. While scientists usually transfer existing fluorescence techniques to their labs, we succeeded to develop several novel fluorescence techniques including the fluorescence solvent relaxation technique, z-scan Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS), Fluorescence Lifetime Correlation Spectroscopy (FLCS), and Dynamic Saturation Optical Microscopy (DSOM).

Secondly, and this is connected with the application of those novel fluorescence techniques, we are the first group within the Czech Republic, which is addressing fundamental biophysical questions connected with phospholipid bilayers, a rather realistic model of biological membranes.

• M. Hof started to build up the group in 1999. As a starting investment the JH-Institute bought a basic FCS Microscope (Zeiss).
• In 2001 the lab was extended by additional rooms and equipment (mainly, TCSPC and steady state fluorimeters (Horiba JY). The confocal microscope was extended for Fluorescence Lifetime FCS. The growth of the laboratory was heavily supported by the home institute as well as by Czech science foundations.
• In 2005 The Academy of Sciences financed the built up of a Time Resolved Single Molecule Sensitive Confocal Fluorescence Microscope (PicoQuant, Olympus) and the group became part of the newly founded Department of Biophysical Chemistry.
• In 2006 the group became the coordinator of the National Research Centre "Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy in Biological and Medical Sciences" that is financed by the Ministry of Education.

The fast and dynamic development of our group was stimulated by the support given by the J. Heyrovsky Institute, as well as by the success in obtaining extramural funds for salaries and equipment. This has been accompanied by involvement of a large number of PhD students, in turn supporting the scientific carrier of several outstanding young scientists.

The latter might be documented by the fact that these former PhD students (i.e. Jana Humpolíčková, Jan Sýkora, and Aleš Benda) obtained prestigious awards like "Česká Hlava" in category Doctorandus, the prize of the Minister of education, youth and sport for excellent students, the "Women in Science Award" (L'Oreal/Unesco) or the Josef Hlávka Award.

On top of that the recent acquisition of a Purkyně fellow (Marek Cebecauer) is supposed to strengthen further the biological relevance of the results obtained by those advanced fluorescence methods developed.

Ten years after accepting the first PhD student, obtaining the Praemium Academie (comparable to Leibniz award in Germany) will allow to further extend the philosophy of supporting selected young scientists and intensify our efforts to solve actual biophysical and cell biological questions at atomistic and molecular level, respectively.