Jette Lengefeld

Jette is a Assistant Professor at HERM - MedH - Karolinska Institutet since 2023 and a group leader at the University of Helsinki (Finland) since 2021. Her research team is investigating how blood stem cells fail to maintain their functions during aging and disease.

Jette did her graduate studies at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) focusing on asymmetric cell division in the lab of Yves Barral. Jette performed her postdoctoral studies at MIT (US) in the lab of Angelika Amon, where she discovered cellular enlargement as an aging factor of blood stem cells.

The failure to regenerate tissues during aging due to loss of stem cell function causes major health problems. However, it is still unclear how stem cells fail to maintain their functions during aging and disease.

We discovered a new aspect of stem cell aging in vivo: cellular enlargement. We found that stem cells increase in size during aging and that this is causing their functional decline. However, we are only beginning to understand how size impacts stem cell fitness and the physiological importance of this process remains unsolved.

Lab webpage: http://lengefeldlab.com

Selected recent publications:

1) Davies D, van der Handel K, Bharadwaj S, Lengefeld J†, review
“Cellular enlargement - a new hallmark of aging?“,
Frontiers Cell and Developmental Biology (2022)

2) Padovani F, Mairhörmann B, Falter-Braun P, Lengefeld J, Schmoller KM
“Segmentation, tracking and cell cycle analysis of live-cell imaging data with Cell-ACDC“
BMC Biology (2022)

3) Lengefeld J†, Cheng CW, Maretich P, Blair M, Hagen H, McReynolds MR, Sullivan E, Mayors K, Roberts C, Steiner J, Kang JH, Miettinen TP,
Manalis SR, Antebi A, Rabinowitz JD, Morrison S, Lees J, Boyer L, Yilmaz O, Amon A
“Cell size is a determinant of stem cell potential during aging“,
Science Advances (2021)

4) Neurohr G, Terry R, Lengefeld J, Bonney M, Brittingham G, Moretto F, Miettinen T, Pontano Vaites L, Soares L, Paulo J, Harper W, Buratowski S, Manalis S, van Werven F, Holt L, Novak B, Tyson J, Amon A†
“Excessive cell growth causes cytoplasm dilution and contributes to senescence“,
Cell (2019)

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcell.2022.1036602/full
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12915-022-01372-6
[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abk0271
[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30739799/