David Suter (biologist)

He is currently a professor at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), where he heads the Suter Lab at the Institute of Bioengineering of the School of Life Sciences.

He graduated in 2007 with a PhD on embryonic stem cell differentiation and transgenesis,[3] and in 2008, he received his Doctor of Medicine (MD) also from the University of Geneva.

Together with Christof Gebhardt, Suter developed a new technology allowing to visualize and measure the residence time of single molecules of transcription factors binding to DNA.

They discovered that the time scales of transcriptional memory varied over a range of two to ten cell cycles for different mammalian genes.

[9] They developed a novel approach based on a fluorescent timer to simultaneously monitor protein synthesis and degradation rates in live cells.

They found that small endogenous fluctuations of OCT4 and to a lesser extent SOX2 significantly impact the potential of ES cells to commit to different germ layers.

Fluorescence microscopy time series of a dividing cell, illustrating that the Sox2 transcription factor is retained on mitotic chromosomes. They also found that SOX2 plays a key role in maintaining cell identity during the transition from mitosis to interphase. [ 12 ]