Katja Röper: Deciphering tissue origami

JCB • VOLUME 215 • NUMBER 2 • 2016 140 As a teenager growing up in West Berlin, Katja Röper witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall from Checkpoint Charlie, and the opening of the Brandenburg Gate, amazing moments in history that reshaped her home country. During these years, her parents— a mineralogist and a nurse—were also shaping her future career as a scientist by encouraging her fascination with biology. Röper went on to study biochemistry at the Free University of Berlin—in the building where Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fi ssion. The biochemistry classes provided an intense fi rst research experience as an undergraduate where she forged many lifelong friendships. Wieland Huttner’s group at the University of Heidelberg was her next educational home, as a postgraduate student studying how the multipass transmembrane protein, Prominin, controls asymmetric division of polarized neuroepithelial cells in mouse embryos. Wanting to spread her wings farther during her postdoc, Röper joined Nick Brown’s lab at the University of Cambridge to “learn Drosophila” and investigate how a spectraplakin protein called Shot interacts with and coordinates different cytoskeletal systems. With a BBSRC fellowship in hand, Röper then set up her own lab in Cambridge, bringing together the power of fl y genetics and advanced microscopy techniques to watch and understand the reshaping of fl at epithelial sheets into tubular structures in developing embryos. We contacted her to learn more.