Dr. Christoph Andreas Diebolder
Head of Core Facility cryoEMCharité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Robert-Rössle-Straße 10
13125 Berlin
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Expertise
Christoph Diebolder acts as Head of the Core Facility for Cryo Electron Microscopy at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. He has >13 years experience in the field of cryo electron microscopy and tomography. He studied Technical Biology at Stuttgart University, Germany. After being exposed to electron microscopy during a research internship with the Schweikert lab he decided to learn more about cryoEM and moved to the Netherlands where he got trained by Dr. Roman Koning at the Leiden University Medical Center and wrote his master thesis about the genome structure of bacteriophage MS2.
He decided to stay in the Netherlands and did his PhD in structural biology in the groups of Prof. Piet Gros (Utrecht University) and Prof. Bram Koster (LUMC), investigating several protein complexes relevant for initiation pathways of the innate immune system. Diebolders cryo-ET based finding that antibodies cluster on surfaces as hexamers in order carry out one of their main effector functions, activation of the complement cascade, marks a key discovery in the field of antibody biology, impacting the fields of antibody technology (Genmab HexabodyTM platform) and antibody-based immuno therapy (several cancer therapeutics in (pre-) clinical studies).
After a short Postdoc period in Bram Kosters lab he joined Netherlands national facility for cryo electron Nanoscoly (NeCEN) in 2015. As scientific operator – and since 2017 as tenured Sr. EM Scientist - he maintained and operated the cryo-lab and the cryo-transmission electron microscopes of the facility (a Talos screening microscope, a Titan Krios with energy filter and K2, and a cs-corrected Titan Krios with Falcon III), and trained new users in the art of cryoEM.
In February 2020, Christoph Diebolder was appointed Head of the cross institutional cryoEM core facility at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin where he is leading a multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers from Charité, MDC, and FMP aiming to establish and maintain a state of the art center for in-situ structural biology. Central to this effort is the active development of advanced workflows combining life cell imaging, cryo-light microscopy, cryo-FIB milling with lamella liftout, cryo electron tomography and sub tomogram averaging. To this end the facility has secured multimillion EUR funding by DFG and BUA for a new dedicated research building and cutting-edge instrumentation and will open its doors by end of 2020.
