Karien Wiesmeijer

After graduating from the Higher Laboratory education, I started working on developing M-FISH and RNA FISH for EM in the group of Dr. A.K. Raap at the Department of Cytochemistry & Cytometry at Leiden University. I then moved to the Institute of Human Genetics at the UvA (Dr. M.M.A.M. Mannens) to map chromosome 1p regions in Wilms tumor using molecular cytogenetic tools. I returned to the Department of Cytochemistry & Cytometry (later on: Molecular Cell Biology (LUMC)) to work on various projects: automated detection of foetal cells in maternal blood (Prof. Dr. H.J. Tanke); studying protein and chromatin dynamics using live cell imaging and nuclear protein interactions by FRET and FLIM (Dr. R.W. Dirks); development of high sensitivity lateral flow assays for on-site diagnostics (Dr. P.L.A.M. Corstjens); development of a zebrafish-embryo breast cancer xenograft assay to identify TGF-β pathway targeted drugs for the treatment of cancer (Prof. Dr. P. ten Dijke); studying PAH and cardiovascular development and repair using immunohistochemical  stainings combined with image analysis (Prof. Dr. M.J.T.H. Goumans) .

At present I am a part time member of the microscope facility team. My function here is to give introductions on a broad range of microscopes and to answer all kinds of staining and imaging related questions.

Since September 2018 I joined the group of Dr. K. Szuhai, whose interest lies in the genetics of bone and soft tissue tumors, to work on establishing cell line-based model systems for functional analysis using various molecular and imaging techniques.