Göttingen Graduate Center for Neurosciences, Biophysics, and Molecular Biosciences

Betz, Timo Prof. Dr.

Professor for Biophysics


  • 1997 –2002 Student of Physics, University of Würzburg, Germany
  • 2000 –2001 Graduate Student Physics, Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Texas at Austin, USA
  • 2002 –2003 Diploma Student, Institute of Soft Matter Physics, University of Leipzig, Germany with Josef Käs
  • 2003 –2007 Research Associate (PhD Thesis), Institute of Soft Matter Physics, Leipzig, Germany with Josef Käs
  • 2007 –2007 Researcher, Institute of Soft Matter Physics, Leipzig, Germany, with Josef Käs
  • 2007 –2011 Researcher, Institut Curie, Paris, France, with Cécile Sykes
  • 2011 –2015 Tenured researcher CNRS, Team Leader, Institut Curie, Paris, France
  • 2015 –2016 Group leader, Institute of Cell Biology, Münster, Germany
  • 2015 –2020 Professor for Cell Mechanics (W3), Institute of Cell Biology, Münster, Germany
  • Since Sept. 2020 Professor for Biophysics, Third Institute of Physics, Uni-Göttingen, Germany



Major Research Interests

Every biological system uses fundamental physics to perform its daily function. We study how mechanics is involved and sometimes even responsible for the correct and robust interaction between the different biological components. Although cell and tissue mechanics has been a research focus during the past two decades, we only start to scratch the surface of all the intriguingly complex dependencies between biochemical signaling, mechanical forces and viscoelastic properties. The quantitative description and the mathematical modelling of the complex interaction inside cells and tissue are the focus of the lab. Therefore, we develop new measurement methods to quantify forces and tension in 3D tissue, membranes and filaments. Furthermore, we investigate new microscopy and analysis methods and integrate these with quantitative measurements of the viscoelastic properties in cells can tissue.
A main aim is to decipher the fundamental physical processes leading to stability and robustness despite the complexity and highly non-equilibrium and non-linear nature of any living system. We hope to undercover new physics in observing and describing the complexity of the living world.
Projects we study are:
Intracellular passive and active microrheology. We are interested in the underlying mechanism of organelle distribution during cell division, migration and polarity, and try to understand these by studying the intracellular forces, the local changes of viscoelastic material properties and the active, non-equilibrium processes driving the active and passive transport inside cells.
Collective cell migration in development and cancer. Collective cell migration is a fundamental process during embryogenesis but also in metastatic invasion of cancer cells in the surrounding stroma. To study the physical processes involved in the collective cell movements we use zebrafish development and reconstituted cancer spheroids.
Instrument design and software development. A large part of our projects requires to develop new instruments, microscopes and combinations of optics and advanced biophysics tools. Often, we extend existing methods and commercial microscopes to yield new and better performance. Key elements here are optical tweezers and high precision position detection methods.

 



Homepage Department/Research Group

http://betzlab.uni-goettingen.de/



Selected Recent Publications


  • Hurst S, Vos B, Brandt M, Betz T (2021) Intracellular softening and increased viscoelastic fluidity during division, Nature Physics, 17, 1270-1276
  • Turlier H, Betz T (2019) Unveiling the Active Nature of Living-Membrane Fluctuations and Mechanics. Annual Review of Cond. Mat. Physics 10
  • Turlier H, Fedosov DA, Audoly B, Auth T, Gov NS, Sykes C, Joanny JF, Gompper G, Betz T (2016) Equilibrium physics breakdown reveals the active nature of red blood cell membrane fluctuations. Nature Physics 12:513–519
  • Ahmed W, Betz T (2015) Dynamics cross-links tune the solid-fluid behaviour of living cells. PNAS 112(21): 6527-6528
  • Betz T, Koch D, Lu Y-B, Franze K, and Käs JA (2011) Growth cones as soft and weak force generators. PNAS 108(33):13420–13425
  • Betz T, Lenz M, Joanny J-F, and Sykes C (2009) ATP-dependent mechanics of red blood cells. PNAS 106(36): 15320–15325
  • Betz T, Lim D, and Kas JA (2006) Neuronal growth: A bistable stochastic process. Physical Review Letters 96(9): 098103