News from the Institute

Today, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced the election of its new members for 2019. Amongst them is IBC2 director Ivan Đikić.

Since 1780, the Academy has regularly been electing new members to recognize their outstanding achievements in academia, the arts, business, philanthropy, and public affairs, in line with founders’ vision “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”

As published today in eLife, a team around IBC2 Group Leader Manuel Kaulich has developed a new technology for generating CRISPR/Cas gene perturbation reagents. They dubbed their innovation as “3Cs”, as gRNA are synthesized as covalently-closed circles.

It enables the fast and, most importantly, cloning-free production of gRNA and shRNA libraries. By this, the 3Cs technology overcomes one of the major caveats of conventional library production.

 IBC2 group leader Christian Münch was recently admitted as a member to the JQ Young Academy. Within the “Science funding” program of JQYA, Christian will now receive financial support for his independent research group until October 2023.

The Münch group is deciphering quality responses upon mitochondrial protein misfolding, a field with very high biomedical impact. Misfolding of mitochondrial proteins occurs e.g. as part of neurodegeneration, and little is known about how cellular response mechanisms contribute to the onset of respective diseases and their progression. The JQYA is an independent academy within Goethe University which foster researchers at the start of their independent careers.

Rukmini Mukherjee was awarded with one of the prestigious Research Fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which enable postdoctoral researchers from abroad to pursue their next career step in Germany.

The proposed project focuses on a selective autophagy process which targets the endoplasmic reticulum (ER phagy). The molecular events driving ER phagy still remain elusive, but it is well known that the reticulon family of proteins (RTNs) plays a key role in the process. Rukmini’s project now aims at deciphering the molecular function of reticulons in ER phagy using high resolution microscopy and biochemistry.

IBC2 Director Ivan Dikic is one of the worlds’ most influential scientists as revealed by Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researchers List. He has been selected for his exceptional performance in the newly introduced category “Cross-Field”, based on his multiple high impact papers published across several fields.

The methodology used by Clarivate Analytics to curate this annual list aims at identifying scientists who have substantial contemporary impact. It is calculated from the number of highly cited papers produced, with a highly cited paper being defined as ranking amongst the top 1% as measured by citations for the field and year.