As announced today by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) on selective autophagy will be funded for another four years. The Centre was established in 2016 under the lead of IBC2 Director Ivan Dikic with partners in Frankfurt and Mainz. It was the first consortium in Germany that started to systematically address challenging questions in autophagy, focussing on the molecular determinants of selectivity, the context-dependent roles of autophagy and its impact on pathophysiology and therapy of human diseases. For the 2nd funding period, the consortium plans to continue its successful path to better understand the mechanistic regulation of autophagy networks in health and disease. To deliver the ambitious and highly integrative work program, access to state-of-the-art technologies is critical for many projects, and the consortium plans to expand the existing platform for quantitative proteomics to include modeling and simulation methods.

In addition, new platforms for genomic and chemical screening and for quantitative phenotype analysis will be established. To close the gap on missing expertise, the team was significantly expanded with colleagues from other German institutions. Besides Goethe University, the Universities of Mainz, Tübingen, Freiburg and Munich, the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, the Institute of Molecular Biology in Mainz and the Georg Speyer Haus in Frankfurt are involved in the 2^nd funding period.