Till Bretschneider
Title
Professor
Contact
Department of Computer Science
Room MB5.30, Mathematical Sciences Building
Academic Loop Road
University of Warwick, CV4 7AL, United Kingdom
E-mail: T.Bretschneider@warwick.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 24 761 50252
Research Interests
My main research interest is to understand principles of self-organisation in the actin cytoskeleton which drives shape changes in animal cells. I have been predominantly working on cell motility in Dictyostelium amoebae as a biological model system, and more recently on the cellular uptake of nutrients where the cell membrane shapes into large vesicles that are internalised.
We combine quantitative image analysis, employing a wide range of machine learning methods, with computational modelling.
Software we develop include our widely-used QuimP software for correlating cortical cell fluorescence with membrane movements, and LineageTracker, a multi-feature cell tracker which allows to incorporate time-varying features to detect cell divisions. CellTracker is specifically dedicated to measuring periodic nuclear-cytoplasmic translocations of transcription factors.
Current focus is on extending these methods to 3D time series data from fast lattice light sheet microscopy, with neural networks playing an increasingly prominent role in feature extraction and generative modelling to map the complex spatio-temporal dynamics of cellular processes.
Current UKRI Funded Projects
| EPSRC/NSF, Sep 23 - Aug 26, £876,547, with Michael Smutny (PI), Warwick Medical School, and Melikhan Tanyeri, Duquesne University (USA) | CMMI-EPSRC: A novel multifunctional platform to study cell and nuclear mechanosensing |
| EPSRC, Mar 22 - Feb 25, £398,041 | Machine learning for extracting spatio-temporal biological patterns on evolving domains |
| BBSRC, Mar 22 - Apr 25, £520,833, with Jason King (PI), University of Sheffield | Organisation of actin waves and cups by differential GTPase activity |
| MRC, Oct 20 - Sep 24, MRC DTP iCASE PhD studentship for Scott Brooks with industry partner 3i | Real-time prediction of cellular states in 3D lattice light sheet microscopy |
Completed UKRI grants
Publications
Full list; Google Scholar; Scopus; 
orcid.org/0000-0002-5317-603X
Further Affiliations
I am also a member of the Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology & Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research (SBIDER) and the Centre for Mechanochemical Cell Biology.