Michal Franek

Michal Franek graduated from Molecular Biology and Genetics at Masaryk University in 2017, with a thesis thematically centered around the nucleolar organization in embryonic stem cells, completed at the Institute of Biophysics under the Czech Academy of Sciences. During his PhD, he briefly explored advanced imaging techniques during an internship at the Institute of Oral Biology in Oslo, under the supervision of professor Thomas Kuntziger. His PhD was supported by the PhD talent scholarship, awarded for 3 years funded by the Brno City Municipality for young scientists. After his PhD, he joined the group of Jíří Fajkus, a renowned expert on telomere biology and continued his work on DNA repair, epigenetics, replication, and stability of functional repeats, such as telomeres, centromeres or ribosomal DNA. At the start of his post-doctoral stay, he introduced novel approaches to the study of repeats, including techniques such as DNA and chromatin fiber preparation from plant nuclei, and continued with developing applications of super-resolution microscopy such as structured illumination microscopy (SIM) or stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) for use in plant models. He was awarded the 2-year CzechoSlovak Microscopy Society stipend in 2022, as well as obtained three distinct Czech Bioimaging projects, supporting his efforts in conducting state of the art microscopy and developing novel methodical protocols (Franek et al., 2024 Nat. communications). His current focus is on the analysis of DNA repair in plant roots in-vivo using laser microirradiation techniques (Nespor-Dadejova, Franek, 2022, New Phytologist), with the hope of developing and validating this experimental system so that it can become widely used across plant biology laboratories worldwide.