This interview originally appeared in the MCB Spring 2025 Transcript newsletter.
Since joining MCB’s faculty in 2023, Assistant Professor Bronwyn Lucas has had a productive two years: She’s been setting up her lab and her team is growing rapidly, including three PhD students, two postdocs, and several rotation students. Her team has been working on computational projects, which are starting to produce some interesting data, and rewritten a great deal of software. The lab has just submitted its first manuscript for review to Current Opinion in Structural Biology. And last summer, Lucas went on maternity leave and now has a nine-month-old daughter.
“One of the most amazing experiences for me has been just how competent these students are,” Lucas says of her team. “Each of the students is working on very different project, but all toward a similar goal.”
The focus of the Lucas Lab’s work is developing practical methods and software for cryogenic electron microscopy of entire cells—the building blocks of organisms. This tool allows them to “see” individual molecules within a cell with tremendous accuracy, “Our ultimate goal is to identify basically everything in the cell,” she says. “The way I think about it, new imaging technologies have a dramatic impact on biology. Seeing in more detail allows us to ask new questions, just like with the introduction of the microscope.”
To gather its data, the team uses a rich assortment of tools and equipment, both at MCB and at other facilities, including a focused ion beam to create thin sections of cells; UC Berkeley’s Cal Cryo@QB3 cryogenic electron microscopes; and Berkeley’s Electron Microscope Laboratory. They’re also taking advantage of a partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Institute for Advanced Biological Imaging. In addition, the Lucas Lab has started combining its methods with machine-learning tools to locate molecules in images of cells, a direction that is looking quite promising for the further development of its work.
“One of the great things about being in the Bay Area is that it’s such a fertile environment with energy and equipment from all these other research institutes,” Lucas says. “It’s allowing us to develop complementary methods to other work in this field. One example is the new microscope hardware that’s being developed here at UC Berkeley by our colleague Holger Müller in physics. His new laser phase plate cryogenic electron microscope is the first in the world and is providing clearer images that will help us locate molecules in cells.”
Because Lucas’s work goes to the very root of human biology, the translational potential is vast. Determining what makes a cancer cell different from a non-cancer cell, for example. Or looking at a condition, like Parkinson's Disease, that progresses over time—identifying what molecular features cells have at different stages and potentially diagnosing the disease earlier. “We're still at the point of developing these tools, but potentially, this could be the ultimate goal,” Lucas says.
The Lucas Lab has also learned how to get structural information about molecules using fewer molecules, and these techniques have been used to study the interactions of drugs with their targets using less material. That could result in quicker drug screens. “We have data demonstrating that we can even look at drugs binding to their target molecules inside cells,” Lucas says.
On the instruction side, Lucas has done some guest lecturing and looks forward to teaching her first full class. The mentoring of individual students has also been very rewarding. “One of the best aspects of mentoring is hearing all the new ideas that aren’t mine,” she says. “I can tell people my vision and set a direction where I think we should go, but then having someone else bring you these new ideas and collaborate on that, it’s been really exciting and fun.”
That collaborative, supportive environment is something she appreciates about the MCB culture. “It’s rare to find an institution that performs at this level of science but that’s also as collegial as it is here,” she says. In particular, she has loved the camaraderie of MCB’s junior faculty, which communicates via a Slack group and meets for lunch monthly to troubleshoot problems and discuss upcoming projects. “The peer mentoring that we have here is just really special, she says.”
When not on campus or in the lab, Lucas loves to decompress by spending time outdoors with her husband and new baby. Being out in nature is not only a calming element, but also an inspiration for one who’s focused on the basic building blocks of life. After all, from atoms to ecosystems, all of biology is connected, she says. It's how those molecules within cells come together that takes something from not living to living, and that's the level of detail that her lab is studying.
“Because of the nature of what we're doing, we could potentially go out into the environment and collect samples and come back to study them,” she says. “The number of organisms and level of detail for which we have information is about to explode, and there will be all sorts of new forms that we've never known to exist in nature. There’s an unlimited possibility that we—not just our lab, but we as a scientific endeavor—could uncover.”