News from the Institute

Infections with bacterial pathogens represent a global burden and are a major cause of death worldwide. For the design of new treatment paradigms it is essential to understand the intricate interplay between bacterial virulence strategies and host defense. The Dikic laboratory now added the next piece to the puzzle: They elucidated how the Salmonella effector enzyme SopA, a HECT-like E3 ligase, targets two host proteins involved in activating the immune defense (TRIM56 and TRIM65) and triggers their degradation. Atomic details of this new mechanism have now been published in Nature Communications and give a detailed insight into how Salmonella increases its own infectivity by interfering with the host immune response.

The Institute of Biochemistry II welcomes its new independent group leader Dr. Christian Münch. Dr. Münch joins the IBC II after completing his postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School. He is an expert on protein homeostasis and quantitative mass spectrometry and will establish the Protein Quality Control group at IBC II.

Hadir Marei, postdoctoral scientist in the group of Ivan Dikic at IBC2, was awarded a 2-year Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The funded project will focus on further elucidating the regulatory interplay between intracellular signaling cascades and the autophagic pathway.

Recently, Dr. Heike Angerer, postdoc in the Structural Bioenergetics Group at IBC2, received a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG), enabling her to study the importance of de novo synthesized long-chain fatty acid chains in mitochondria. Heike’s previous work showed that long acyl chains are required for the function of several mitochondrial enzymes, including the essential respiratory chain, sustaining cellular energy supply. In the next two years, Heike aims at understanding the impact of mitochondrial fatty acids on mitochondrial function, since malfunction in this pathway was linked to various human diseases.

This year’s Nobel Essay in Cell has been written by  Ivan Dikic (IBC2) together with Sharon Tooze (Francis Crick Institute, London). Published on time for the Nobel Ceremony on 10th December, the article highlights milestones leading to the discovery of the molecular principles underlying autophagy by Yoshinori Ohsumi, who is this years’ winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. Dikic and Tooze tell the story of a simple yet insightful yeast genetic screen that revealed what later was recognized to be one of the most powerful quality-control pathways in cells.