Marvin Tanenbaum is developing revolutionary imaging techniques that allow him to film molecular processes in living cells at the level of individual biomolecules.This provides fundamentally new insights into what goes wrong at the cellular level with diseases such as cancer.
Genetic processes live on screen
Everyone understands that you have to film, not photograph a soccer match to see how the game went. Yet until recently, scientists had to make do with snapshots of how genes are expressed in our cells, leaving crucial moments invisible. Thanks to the work of Marvin Tanenbaum, it is increasingly possible to follow these dynamic processes ‘live,’ and to actually film what happens in living cells.
In his laboratory at the Hubrecht Institute, Tanenbaum is developing revolutionary imaging techniques that not only provide sharper imagery, but also allow him to follow individual molecules. Whereas other researchers often study large groups of cells simultaneously, Tanenbaum can zoom in on the activity of individual biomolecules in a single cell. His unique approach has led to fundamentally new insights into how genes work in healthy cells and how they change during processes such as viral infections and the development of cancer.
His most influential invention is the ‘SunTag’ technology, an ingenious method that marks individual proteins with fluorescent tags, making them highly visible. By then using sophisticated microscopes to study how these labeled protein molecules behave, Tanenbaum made visible for the first time how RNA molecules in living cells are translated into proteins. This technology, now used by many laboratories worldwide, revealed surprising discoveries. For example, it turns out that most genes produce many different protein variants, and that this is much more common than scientists had expected. Another innovation, the VIRIM technology, allowed Tanenbaum to film how a virus enters a cell and multiplies there. This groundbreaking technique revealed why some cells are more resistant to viral infections than others, an issue that had remained unsolved for decades.
In the coming years, Tanenbaum will take another intriguing step. He wants to understand how cells deal with errors during protein production. Recent research shows that harmful influences such as UV radiation or chemotherapy not only damage DNA, but also disrupt RNA translation – the process by which RNA is converted into proteins. As for the DNA damage, the cell has developed special repair mechanisms to detect this and to fix problems. By making film recordings of individual RNA molecules, Tanenbaum discovered how cells respond to such problems, which may explain how UV radiation or chemotherapy kill cells. By being able to follow these processes at the molecular level, he uncovers a hitherto mostly hidden world of cellular dynamics. His work makes it clear that we cannot truly understand the workings of our cells until we see them live in action.
Marvin Tanenbaum (1980) studied Medical Biology at the University of Amsterdam. In 2010 he obtained his PhD with honors for research into cell division conducted at the UMC Utrecht. After working as a postdoc in America for four years, he has been working as a group leader at the Hubrecht Institute since 2015. His research seeks to understand how genes are ‘translated’ in the cell. Tanenbaum has won several research grants, including a Vidi and Vici grant from NWO and ERC Starting and Consolidator Grants. Since 2017, his research group has been part of Oncode Institute, and in 2022 he was appointed Professor at TU Delft.
