High-throughput technologies

In neuromuscular diseases, neurons and muscle cells stop communicating properly. Researchers led by Mina Gouti can now model this in 2D in a culture dish. Writing about their findings in “Nature Communications”, they say the new model promises to revolutionize high-throughput drug screening studies.

Whether aggressive cancer cells can spread unchecked depends, to no small degree, on their cellular neighborhood. Fabian Coscia wants to analyze exactly what happens at the proteome level during this interaction. He has now been selected for a €1 million-plus grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to pursue this research.

Yoichiro Sugimoto has headed the MDC lab “Molecular mechanisms of environment sensing” since July 2022. His team investigates how cells respond to changes in oxygen levels in their environment and what role disturbances to this system play in certain diseases.

After providing funding for single-cell analysis of adult hearts, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is now supporting the creation of a cell atlas of children’s hearts. An international team led by Christine Seidman of Harvard University and Norbert Hübner of the MDC is again among the funded networks.

Dr. Ilaria Piazza has received one of the 2021 EMBL Alumni Awards for her groundbreaking work on protein-metabolite interactions. She now heads the MDC’s Allosteric Proteomics Lab – but she says if she hadn’t done her PhD work at EMBL Heidelberg, she would not have chosen science as a career.

Proteins are unrivalled in their diversity and complexity, says Erich Wanker, and the slightest of changes can disrupt entire networks of relationships. He wants to understand why, in brain disorders like Huntington’s disease, such disruptions cause the death of neurons – and how this process can be stopped.

Fabian Coscia is the head of the junior research group on Spatial Proteomics at the MDC. He uses artificial intelligence to analyze cancer cell proteomes – the entirety of the proteins produced by the cells. Now, he wants to develop this method further as part of the MSTARS project.

Scientists from the BIH at Charité and the MDC have teamed up with U.S. and Japanese researchers to take single-cell analysis to a new level. They combined methods for determining mRNA levels and DNA accessibility with those used for detecting proteins and mutations in mitochondrial DNA, they report in “Nature Biotechnology”.

All living things are built from proteins. Biologist Matthias Selbach uses the technique of mass spectrometry to understand the various functions of proteins and to systematically hunt down those that cause – or can prevent – disease.

Bone regeneration, dynamic hydrogels and the novel coronavirus – these three topics are currently being researched by MDC scientists in two new Collaborative Research Centres and as part of the COVID-19 Focus Funding initiative of the German Research Foundation (DFG).