Kai Papenfort (Vogel lab) has been awarded a prestigious Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP) long-term fellowship that will further support his career during his time in Princeton in the USA.

The HSFP long-term fellowships support successful applicants who propose a highly innovative project in a different field from their previous work.  Kai will apply a systems biology approach to understand the role of stochasticity and its molecular basis during quorum sensing at the single cell and population levels.  He will perform this work in the labs of Bonnie Bassler and Ned Wintergreen at Princeton University, USA.

Congratulations to Alex Böhm on accepting an offer of the W2 Professorship of Synthetic Microbiology at the LOEWE-Centre for Synthetic Microbiology at the University of Marburg, to where he will move his lab in July 2012.

Alex joined IMIB in 2010 as an independent group leader where he focused his work on how bacteria sense and respond to altering environmental conditions.  A key aspect of this response is how signaling pathways control the formation of surface associated bacterial communities, which is of great medical importance in combating specific chronic infections. In Marburg Alex will switch the emphasis of his research and take a synthetic microbiology approach to the de novo assembly of designer biofilms that can be used as an architectural scaffold for applied uses in areas such as tissue engineering.

Congratulations to Sven Krapmann on accepting an offer for the W2 Professorship of Clinical Microbiology and Immunonolgy at the University of Erlangen, Sven will move his lab to the University at the start of May 2012.

Sven has held the position of Young Investigator group leader at the Research Centre for Infectious Diseases (ZINF) in Würzburg since 2007.  During this time his work has focused on understanding the processes associated with Aspergillus fumigatus pathogenicity, including the metabolic and signaling pathways involved in virulence and sexual development.  Sven plans to shift the focus his work in Erlangen to the immune response of the host upon Aspergillus infection.

Dr. Stan Gorski has joined IMIB as a Scientific Coordinator from February 2012.  He is affiliated with the Vogel lab, the IMIB and the Research Centre for Infectious diseases, ZINF.

Stan obtained his PhD from the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds, UK for mechanistic studies of protein folding reactions, before moving on for a post-doctoral position in the lab of Tom Mistleli at the National Cancer Institute at the NIH in Bethesda, USA where he used biochemical and live cell imaging approaches to study protein dynamics associated with chromatin structure and transcription in living cells.  From 2006 to 2011, Stan was then a Scientific Editor at The EMBO Journal in Heidelberg where he was responsible for the chromatin, transcription and RNA content in the journal.

March 19, 2012: Anna Eulalio has been awarded and accepted a junior research group position based on funding from the Bavarian Molecular Biosystems Research Network (BioSysNet).  She will start her lab at IMIB in April 2012 and will focus on the consequences of bacterial infection on host cell RNA metabolism.

Ana obtained her PhD from the University of Coimbra and Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology in Portugal.  Her subsequent post-doctoral studies at the EMBL, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology and the ICGEB in Trieste focused on miRNA mediated silencing mechanisms and the role of these small RNAs during bacterial infection and in cardiomyocyte biology.  She is supported with 1.5 million Euros fromthe Bavarian Research Network for Molecular Biosystems, which is funded by the Bavarian State Government to provide a basis for closer research alliance between Bavarian Universities.  As a part of this goal the program funds a number of regular junior research groups in addition to associated junior and senior research groups.

Her new research project is aimed at investigating the consequences of pathogenic bacteria on RNA metabolism pathways in infected host cells, as well as the reciprocal effect of these pathways on the life cycle of pathogenic bacteria, issues that remain largely unexplored. The ensuing knowledge will lead to an unprecedented understanding of fundamental aspects of host – pathogen interactions, which may constitute the basis for the development of novel therapeutic approaches against infection by bacterial pathogens.

February 15, 2012: Nicolai Siegel has arrived in Würzburg and started his new lab as a ZINF Young Investigator. The lab will focus on regulatory aspects of gene expression in African trypanosomes, the establishment of chromatin domains and potential links to antigenic variation.

Nicolai obtained his PhD from the Rockefeller University in New York in the lab of George Cross, where he mapped the chromatin signature associated with transcription starts sites in trypanosomes, before moving on the Pasteur Institute in Paris where he studying the role of non-coding RNAs in the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum with Artur Scherf.

Nicolai starts his lab with co-workers Ramona Derr and Johannes Thürich and IMIB wishes them all the best for future success.

December 23, 2011: Congratulations to Dr. Gudrun Koch, who has been awarded a prestigious postdoctoral Erwin Schrödinger fellowship by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). This long-term fellowship will support Gudrun to investigate the role of recently discovered bacterial lipid rafts in pathogenesis, using Staphylococcus aureus as a model organism.

Gudrun obtained a B.Sc. degree from the University of Applied Sciences, Vienna, Austria. Following several research internships in Finland, United Kingdom and Germany, she completed her Ph. D. thesis at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. Gudrun joined the ZINF Young Investigator Group of Dr. Daniel Lopez as a postdoctoral researcher in autumn 2011.

November 25, 2011: Congratulations to ZINF Investigator Cynthia Sharma who is one of three young scientists to be awarded with a Post-doctoral Prize by the Robert Koch Foundation in 2011, in recognition of their outstanding work. Cynthia won the post-doctoral prize in microbiology; Cecilia Chassin (Germany, Hannover) and Lars Dölken (Germany, Munich) were awarded the related prizes in the fields of immunology and virology, respectively. RNA was the big theme this year, since all three awardees were recognized to have broken new grounds on regulatory small RNAs in either pathogens or their hosts. The award ceremony took place in Berlin on November 11.

This year’s Main Prize went to Dr. Jorge Galan of Yale University (New Haven, USA) for his long-standing successful work on bacterial type three secretion systems. Shortly after receiving the prize, Jorge gave a well-received lecture at IMIB on Nov 15.

More information on the prizes and the Robert Koch Foundation is found at
http://www.robert-koch-stiftung.de

Jörg Vogel has been elected as an EMBO Member in the 2011 annual round of elections, as announced this week. He is among 43 renowned life scientists from fourteen countries across Europe whose excellence in research has been acknowledged by the Organization this year.

New EMBO members are nominated and elected annually by existing members. EMBO members represent a high-profile cross section of researchers from all fields of molecular life sciences ranging from developmental biology, genomics, molecular medicine, neuroscience and plant biology to systems biology. Fifty-seven scientists from the EMBO membership have received the Nobel Prize.

Election announcement, EMBO
http://www.embo.org/documents/press11/members_2011.pdf

Press release, Uni Würzburg
http://www.presse.uni-wuerzburg.de/einblick/embo/

We would like to invite you to the next 'Molecular Microbiology Meeting Würzburg, to be held at the Institute of Molecular Infection Biology in 2012. The scientific programme will cover a diverse range of topics including bacterial cell biology, pathogenesis, gene regulation and signalling. [Read more]