Karoline Scholzen

I am a PhD student with a strong background in biochemistry and cell biology. In the past years, we developed highly selective fluorescent probes as activity sensor for the activity of Thioredoxin Reductase (TXNRD1) in live cells. TXNRD1 is a selenoprotein, involved in many redox processes in mammalian cells. Due to the increase of oxidative stress in many cancer types, TXNRD1 is considered a possible therapeutc target, making its research highly relevant.

My research interests are on the one hand to improve the methodology on redox related research, by developing new assays for intracellular enzyme activity measurements in live cells and on the other hand to increase the resolution of those methods and achieve redox signaling with single cell resolution. We use a number of classic biochemical and cell biological methods, which are combined with single cell RNA sequencing to investigate the effect of enzyme activity on different pathways. The single cell resolution allows us to increase the sensitivity of the methods, and capturing enzyme activity fluctuations, which would be lost due to bulk analysis. 

I have been involved as a teaching assistant in the biochemistry lab in the biomedical and medical program.