News from the Institute

In recognition of the comprehensive redesign and modernization of the biology lecture and courses for medical students, Frank Bonzelius today received the Frankfurt Medical School’s most prestigious Teaching Award. The award is endowed with 25,000 €. Over the past years, Frank took the lead in tailoring all teaching material to the digital era. Everything was optimized for smartboard presentation, iPads were introduced for live-analysis of microscopic images and along the lines of a blended-learning scenario, several interactive eBooks were created. It is not the first recognition Frank receives for his outstanding engagement in teaching. He has repetitively been suggested by students for various awards, and has been honored with an award for “Outstanding dedication to teaching” in 2011 by the Frankfurt Medical School.

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.

Today, the Web of Science Group released its annual list of Highly Cited Researchers. On it is IBC2 Director Ivan Dikic, who is recognized for his outstanding record in the field of Molecular Biology and Genetics. The list was curated by analyzing highly-cited papers published between 2008 and 2018. According to the definition, a highly-cited paper is one that at the end of 2018 ranked in the top 1% by citations in a given field and year. Based on the total count of citations for those papers, researchers are then ranked, and the top 1% in each field are selected for the list. By this method, scientists are identified who have published multiple highly-cited papers and who therefore have significant and broad influence in their field. It is the second year in a row that Ivan is on the list, in 2018 he was recognized in the Cross-Field section. Congratulations to Ivan!

Phosphoribosyl-serine (PR) ubiquitination is a novel type of ubiquitination utilized by Legionella pneumophila during infection. In the past three years, IBC2 Director Ivan Dikic and his team were amongst the front-runners in unravelling the exciting chemistry behind. Now they add a new piece to the puzzle: As reported in today’s online issue of Molecular Cell, they discovered two bacterial effectors which are capable of removing PR ubiquitination. According to their function, they named the proteins as DUPs: DeUbiquitinases for PR ubiquitination. They continued to elucidate the catalytic mechanism of DUPs, providing detailed structural understanding of yet another novel chemistry. 

Ivan Dikic, recipient of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2013, gave a Leibniz Lecture on "Ubiquitin and Autophagy networks in Health and Disease" at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda (MD, USA) on 23rd October 2019. The Leibniz Prize is the highest honor awarded in German research. Established in 1985, the prize provides an unparalleled degree of freedom to understanding scientists and academics to pursue their research interests. The DFG organizes Leibniz Lectures in different regions across the world in order to promote the prize, the research conducted by the prize holders and the high quality of German science in general.