News archive 2015

During brain development, cells have to divide and differentiate in a very coordinated way. An international team has identified an important switch that controls this process.

Günter Haufe, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the WWU Münster, has been elected as a member of the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC). Membership of EURASC reflects scientific excellence in the natural sciences, life sciences and technology fields.

For chemist Ryan Gilmour it is like being knighted: the British research community “The Royal Society of Chemistry” has made the CiM Professor a Fellow.

Different skills, joint research: four new pilot projects are starting up within CiM. These projects have to applied for independently by junior researchers, who then work on them and whose responsibility they are. One decisive criterion for the funding is that the project partners have to be from different disciplines.

As part of a project seminar, a group of students at the Institute of Computer Sciences has visualized nothing less than the beginnings of the universe. Their software can represent dark matter and its movement. With their work they won the IEEE’s Scientific Visualization Contest against strong international competition.

Prof. Erez Raz has given a special honour. He serves as a guest editor of a leading scientific journal in the Cell Biology field. He was responsible for the current issue on of Current Opinion in Cell Biology on the topic of “Cell adhesion and migration”.

Prof. Stanley Osher from the University of California in Los Angeles is giving a talk at Münster University as part of the workshop entitled “Variational Methods for Dynamic Inverse Problems and Imaging”. The holder of the Carl Friedrich Gauß Prize explains in this interview how his mathematics not only helps Hollywood, but also helps to catch criminals.

It is not only experts from the world of biomedical research who will be speaking at the International CiM Symposium from September 13th to 15th. Eight junior researchers will also be presenting the results of their research. Mandy Großgarten, who is a doctoral student in Chemistry in the CiM research group led by Prof. Uwe Karst, is one of them.

Doctoral student Jan Metternich and his disstertation supervisor have now succeeded in turning to their advantage a chemical reaction which takes place in the eye and enables us to see light and dark. This process could be used to create special variants (isomers) of important carbon compounds which need a lot of energy to be produced by other means.

In two weeks’ time the International CiM Symposium will be bringing together scientists from a variety of disciplines. But what makes a good symposium? And what would science be without scientific symposia? The organizers of the CiM Symposium – Prof. Erez Raz, Prof. Christian Klämbt and Prof. Ralf Adams – answer these and other questions.

While it is already possible to obtain in vitro pluripotent cells (i.e., cells capable of generating all tissues of an embryo) from any cell type, a team of researchers around Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla (Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology, Strasbourg) and Juanma Vaquerizas (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, Münster) have pushed the limits of science even further. They managed to obtain totipotent cells with the same characteristics as those of the earliest embryonic stages and with even more interesting properties.

Platelets are commonly known as the “first responders” that act in blood clotting and wound closure. However, when there are too few platelets in the blood tissue, it can also trigger fatal bleeding. CiM scientists from the University of Münster found out the reason for this.

CiM brings together scientists from different disciplines to perform novel multidisciplinary research. Through a so-called pilot project programme, physicist Robert Meißner and biologist Wade Sugden will work together to directly measure the forces in blood flow that affect blood cells and their viscoelasticity. Their collaboration has already produced measurable success.

The production of proteins in cells is an absolutely essential process: difficulties that may arise in the protein factory will have a strong impact on the whole organism - diseases are often the result. Max Planck Research group leader Dr. Sebastian Leidel and his colleague Dr. Danny Nedialkova have now for the first time in living cells shown that a tiny missing modification on transfer-RNA (tRNA) is slowing down the protein production and causes a traffic jam in the protein factory.

Scientists working with Dana Meyen und Professor Erez Raz from the Center for Molecular Biology of Inflammation observe how chemical cues control the migration of zebrafish germ cells.

How can you take more sharply defined pictures from the body’s interior – even though motion comes in? Many of our scientists deal with this question in the labs of the Cells-in-Motion Cluster of Excellence. A newly developed programme now enables physicians to do away with the so-called respiratory belt in positron emission tomography (PET). This belt often has only limited uses in the case of people who are seriously ill.

It does not always need to be the most expensive high tech product to optimize medical technology. A scientist from a research group in the Cells-in-Motion Cluster of Excellence used the Xbox technology for an experiment. With the help of this affordable technology Mirco Heß shows scientists a way to better understand clinical images of the inside from the outside.

From the fertilized egg to mature oocytes and sperm: to better investigate germ cell development and specification, it should be able to analyze the complete germ cycle in the petridish. Now, for the first time, scientists in the team of CiM group leader Professor Dr. Hans Schöler (MPI) have established a robust in vitro-system for early germ cell development with human pluripotent stem cells. By using this, they discovered many similarities with germ cell development in mice, but also important differences.

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Prof. Dr. Georg Lenz mainly treats patients who suffer from aggressive cancer of the lymphatic glands. But you will not only meet him in the hospital. Prof. Lenz spends a good share of his working time in his laboratory. Holding the first CiM Clinical Translation Professorship he should, wherever possible, directly apply his scientific findings to clinical therapy and take up and intern apply impulses from the clinic to his research.