The Tans Lab
Biophysics @ AMOLF Amsterdam
About the group
We study the dynamics of single proteins and single cells in organoids using novel experimental approaches.
The group is based at the AMOLF institute in Amsterdam, and is part of the Autonomous Matter department. It is headed by Sander Tans, who is also affiliated with Delft University of Technology, and the Kavli institute of Nanoscience.
If you may be interested to join us, send an e-mail to s.tans@amolf.nl!
NEWS
- Congrats to Kasper for his paper in Science (2025) on cell extrusion in intestinal organoids. Great collaboration with Daniel Krueger and Hans Clevers at the Hubrecht institute.
- Out in Nature Methods (2025): our new cell tracker for organoids and other tissue systems – a step-change in tracking performance! Congrats to Max for this major achievement. You can try it out fully online here: organoidtracker.org.
- New work by Max in collaboration with the Snippert lab on Tuft cell differentiation in the intestine appeared in Nature Communications (2025)
- Well done Katharina, Florian, and others with your papers in Nature Communications (2025) and PNAS (2025) on chaperone-function at the ribosome. Always fun to work with our friends in the Kramer-Bukau lab at Heidelberg University!
- …And also for another paper also in Nature Communications (2025) showing ribosome-ribosome interactions directly for the first time.
- Multiple PhD and PD positions are available, e.g. through an ERC Synergy Grant with researchers from Heidelberg and ETH Zürich. Contact us if you would like to know more!
Organoids
How do tissues self-organize?
We aim to understand the remarkable self-organisation and homeostasis of organs at the cellular level. Using organoids, time-lapse microscopy, and techniques such as AI-driven cell tracking we study the proliferation, differentiation, and spatial reorganisation of cells in real time, within the intestinal epithelium as well as in other systems. We do our organoid work together with my colleague Jeroen van Zon, who runs his group also here at the AMOLF institute.
Key Publications
- Epithelial tension controls intestinal cell extrusion (Science 2025)
- Organoid cell fate dynamics in space and time (Science Advances, 2023)
- Mother cells control daughter cell proliferation in intestinal organoids to minimize proliferation fluctuations (eLife, 2022)
- ppGpp is a bacterial cell size regulator (Current Biology, 2022)
- Bacterial coexistence driven by motility and spatial competition (Nature, 2020)
- Stochasticity of metabolism and growth at the single-cell level (Nature, 2014)
Proteins
How can one protein fold another?
This intriguing question underlies all biological activity, and numerous ageing-related diseases. Recent technical breakthroughs are now making it possible to address it, by directly following the movements and forces of single protein chains within a chaperone complex.
We have pioneered the use of optical tweezers to study these dynamics of individual protein-chaperone complexes, and are currently exploiting a new range of possibilities afforded by simultaneous single-molecule fluorescence.
Key Publications
- Co-translational ribosome pairing enables native assembly of misfolding-prone subunits (Nature Communications 2025)
- Proteome-wide determinants of co-translational chaperone binding in bacteria (Nature Communications 2025)
- Trigger factor accelerates nascent chain compaction and folding (PNAS 2025)
- Protein chain collapse modulation and folding stimulation by GroEL-ES (Science Advances, 2022)
- Processive extrusion of polypeptide loops by a Hsp100 disaggregase (Nature, 2021)
- Alternative modes of client binding enable functional plasticity of Hsp70 (Nature, 2016)
- Small heat shock proteins sequester misfolding proteins in near-native conformation for cellular protection and efficient refolding (Nature Communications, 2016)
- Reshaping of the conformational search of a protein by the chaperone trigger factor (Nature, 2013)
- Direct Observation of Chaperone-Induced Changes in a Protein Folding Pathway (Science, 2007)
Join us
Our open positions are available at the institute website. You can also contact us.