Cancer cell & molecular biologist · Hamburg

Subhajit Dutta

Telomeres, mitochondria and ageing in cancer, read through imaging and computation.

Welcome. I study how telomere biology and mitochondrial function, two systems that change with age, shape what cancer cells become, how they move and how they talk to the immune system. I pair hands-on molecular cell biology and super-resolution microscopy with variational optical flow, deep learning and large-scale public genomic data.

One line of my work concerns mitochondria at the leading edge of migrating cancer cells, where I identified a mitochondria-associated translational hotspot: a site of local protein synthesis at the cell front. Earlier, we showed that telomere length regulates genes far from chromosome ends through non-telomeric binding of the shelterin protein TRF2: telomere-length-dependent TRF2 occupancy at the IL1R1 promoter tunes NF-κB-driven immune signalling in breast tumours, and TRF2 at the TERT promoter controls telomerase expression itself (eLife, 2024 and 2025). I have since extended this to telomere-maintenance and senescence programmes in human immune ageing.

Alongside experiments I build quantitative and computational tools across scales: biophysical analysis of the actin cytoskeleton by variational optical flow and nematic order; pan-cancer integration of TCGA, DepMap and CPTAC with single-cell and spatial transcriptomics and proteomics; gene regulation from expression to chromatin structure, looping and transcription-factor occupancy; and image analysis from histopathology to high-content 4D light-sheet and 5D live-cell FLIM data. The thread through all of it is one question: how telomere biology, mitochondrial function and developmental (oncofetal) programmes together decide what a cancer cell becomes (tumorigenesis) and where it goes (metastasis). If that overlaps with your work, I would be glad to hear from you.