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Prof. Dr. Dagmar Wachten

Member, Steering-Committee Member

Institute of Innate Immunity

Venusberg - Campus 1 53127 Bonn

dwachten@uni-bonn.de

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We aim to understand how cilia work and what their function is. Cilia are subcellular compartments that protrude from the surface of almost every mammalian cell. Cilia can be grouped into two major classes: a) primary cilia, which are immotile and b) motile cilia, which are also called flagella. A prominent example for the latter are sperm flagella. Ciliary dysfunction leads to severe diseases commonly referred to as ciliopathies. They comprise e.g. polycystic kidney disease, obesity, blindness, and infertility. However, the signaling pathways controlling ciliary function are ill-defined. To study ciliary signaling with high spatial and temporal precision, we combine optogenetics and genetically-encoded biosensors with high-resolution microscopy, mouse genetics, and biochemistry. This multidisciplinary approach allows not only to investigate ciliary signaling, but can be applied to any subcellular compartment to study its function with spatial and temporal resolution.

Dagmar Wachten

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Recent publications

  • Adipose ILC2s depend on acetyl-CoA carboxylase 1 to maintain metabolic health.

    Cell metabolism

    Authors: Fotios Karagiannis, Maria Rafailia Theodorou, Fabian Nikolka, Maria Doverman, Dhruvi Shah, Chantal Wientjens, Timothy R McCulloch, Ronja Kardinal, David Colon, Jelena Zurkovic, Jiangyan Yu, Julia Anna Noras, Patricia Weiss, Roman Rombo, Tim Sparwasser, Zeinab Abdullah, Felix Meissner, Christoph Thiele, Jan Hasenauer, Dagmar Wachten, Karsten Hiller, Christoph Wilhelm

  • Primary cilia: master conductors of cellular communication in development and disease.

    Nature reviews. Nephrology

    Authors: Oskar K Thomsen, Gaia Pigino, Lotte B Pedersen, Gregory J Pazour, Dagmar Wachten, Søren T Christensen

  • ConvexGating infers gating strategies from clusters in single cell cytometry data.

    Nature communications

    Authors: Vincent D Friedrich, Karola Mai, Thomas P Hofer, Elfriede Nößner, Lorenzo Bonaguro, Celia L Hartmann, Aleksej Frolov, Caterina Carraro, Doaa Hamada, Mehrnoush Hadaddzadeh Shakiba, Heidi Theis, Dalila Juliana Silva Ribeiro, Dagmar Wachten, F Thomas Wunderlich, Markus Scholz, Fabian J Theis, Matthias Becker, Marc D Beyer, Joachim L Schultze, Maren Büttner

All publications by Prof. Dr. Dagmar Wachten