Sinem Saka leads the Spatial Biology Group at EMBL Heidelberg (Germany). Prior to joining EMBL, Sinem developed highly multiplexed imaging techniques as a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Fellow and EMBO postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Boston (US). She earned her PhD in Molecular Biology in 2013 from the University of Goettingen (Germany) where she was a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD Fellow in the International Max Planck Research School, investigating nanoscale protein organization in cellular membranes with novel super-resolution and multi-modal imaging approaches.

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We leverage the predictability hybridization kinetics and orthogonality of DNA sequences to repurpose DNA as a detection and barcoding tool. We previously developed SABER-FISH and Immuno-SABER to allow flexible in situ signal amplification and multiplexed detection for proteins and nucleic acids. More recently, we implemented DNA barcoding for a new spatial transcriptomics approach, Light-Seq, which directly integrates fluorescence imaging and whole-transcriptome next-generation sequencing of the same cells in fixed biological samples.  We are further expanding our technology suite with new approaches to probe and modulate the organisation of subcellular compartments, and to annotate RNAs based on their functional or lifecycle states. We are using these methods to directly link high-resolution visual phenotypes to transcriptomic profiles and address the fundamental question of how single-cell identity relates to spatial and molecular organisation. These efforts will help to uncover the complexity of intricate diseases like immunodeficiencies, cancer and neurodegeneration, and provide new insights into cellular function and disease formation.