You want to work on exciting and diverse research projects employing state-of-the-art methodologies? You want to join a young and highly motivated team? Then get your CVs ready, there is a job opening for a Technical Assistant!
The basic information: Salary TV-L E9, starting date as soon as possible, application deadline December 22nd 2019.
For more information (in German) please click here.
Some like it cold: (Body)temperature-controlled kinase activity in circadian biology, sex determination and beyond
In numerous animals (including crocodiles, alligators, tortoises, and some teleost fish), sex is determined independently of the genotype. Rather the temperature experienced during embryonic or larval stages results in the development of phenotypically male or female animals. Exemplarily, exposing alligator eggs to elevated temperatures produces mostly male offspring. The mechanism by which subtle changes in temperature are sensed to govern sex-specific development, however, has remained elusive.
On January 30th 2020 (2p.m. in H53), Florian Heyd from the Freie Universität Berlin will talk about protein kinases that act as very sensitive thermo-sensors to control changes to alternative splicing. The exciting work combines enzymology, structural-, and RNA biology to reveal in molecular detail how the activity of CDC-like kinases (CLKs) is altered by changes in temperature, resulting in differential phosphorylation of SR-proteins and subsequently in altered splicing patterns.
Click here for the advertisement of the talk.
The Collaborative Research Centre 960 (SFB960) ‘RNP biogenesis: assembly of ribosomes and non-ribosomal RNPs and control of their function’ has recently been awarded funding for another four years (see this post). The 18 group leaders (pictuerd below) will head 16 research and 3 service projects and a graduate school.
We are looking forward to four more years of collaborative research and exciting new findings.
Principal Investigators third funding period (from left to right): J. Medenbach, J. Griesenbeck, T. Heise, P. Milkereit, W. Seufert, A. Bruckmann, S. Ferreira-Cerca, M. Kretz, J. Perez-Fernandez, T. Dresselhaus, G. Längst, R. Sprangers, H. Tschochner, D. Grohmann, and C. Engel;
missing on the photo: G. Sommer, S. Sprunck, G. Meister, K. Grasser
Today, Moritz Freyberg joined the lab for his MSc work. He already spent some time with us for an extended practical and he will now continue to work on stress-mediated gene regulation in mammalian cells. Welcome back!
Last year, the PhD students of the International Giessen Graduate Centre for the Life Sciences (GGL) invited me to to deliver a keynote lecture during the annual conference. To sum up the event: I had a blast! On the one hand, it was great to return to my Alma Mater – the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen – for a scientifically very diverse and exciting meeting covering ten interdisciplinary research sections. On the other hand, I could catch up with old friends and colleagues many of whom I am still collaborating with.
This year, a speaker invited to deliver a keynote lecture at the conference unfortunately had to cancel on short notice. I was lucky enough to be asked to step in and present some of our recent data at the 2019 GGL conference on September 4th. Needless to say, that after the great experience last year, I agreed immediatly. And again, I very much enjoyed the conference and the scientific discussions. It was great to see the enthusiasm of the GGL students and to listen to their talks on very diverse and exciting topics.
I would like to thank the students of the ‘Protein and Nucleic Acid Interactions’ section of the GGL (and in particluar Christina Pfafenrot) very much for hosting me and the entire GGL team for the hospitality!
Get motivation letters ready! Registration for the EMBO Practical Course on Measuring Translational Dynamics by Ribosome Profiling is now open. The application deadline is Febraury 9th 2020.
We are thrilled to have a great line-up of speakers and tutors including Nicholas Ingolia (University of California, Berkeley, USA), Rachel Green (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA), Thomas Preiss (The Australian National University, Canberra, AU), Anne Willis (University of Cambridge, UK), Marina Rodnina (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, DE), Gerben Menschaert (BIOBIX, University of Ghent, BE), and Vladimir Benes (EMBL Heidelberg). During the course, we aim to provide both insight into the theoretical background of ribosome profiling as well as practical sessions with hands-on experimentation and computational training on how to perform ribosome profiling experiments and to analyze the resulting data. We are very much looking forward to your application and to meeting you at the Advanced Training Centre at EMBL Heidelberg in May!
Anna Bichler has joined the lab for her BSc thesis work. She will follow up on some novel candidate proteins that we found to be induced by the Unfolded Protein Response. A warm welcome to our new colleague!
In a collaborative effort spearheaded by the Ahrends lab at the ISAS (Leibniz-Institut für Analytische Wissenschaften) in Dortmund, we established a targeted proteomics approach aimed at analyzing components of the Unfolded Protein Response (UPR), an adaptive signal transduction pathway triggered by the accumulation of unfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum. The UPR comprises an important cellular stress response that aims at re-instating cellular homoeostasis and it plays a key role in a variety of disorders (including diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders, and inflammatory processes). It has also emerged as an attractive target for therapeutic intervention in cancer due to its implication in tumor progression, malignancy and resistance to therapy. The newly developed high-resolution targeted proteomics strategy combines high specificity and sensitivity, allowing the accurate quantification of UPR proteins down to the lower attomol range in a straightforward way without any prior enrichment or fractionation approaches. This has allowed us to determine cellular protein copy numbers of UPR receptors, transducers and effectors, yielding novel insights into an important cellular stress response pathway.
Read the full manuscript at Scientific Reports: Nguyen et al. A sensitive and simple targeted proteomics approach to quantify transcription factor and membrane proteins of the unfolded protein response pathway in glioblastoma cells.
The 24th annual meeting of the RNA Society took place from June 11th to 16th in the beautiful city of Krakow, Poland. It was a scientifically very stimulating conference with great talks on virtually all aspects of RNA biology. I am very happy that our abstract on how Drosophila Sister-of-Sex-lethal antagonizes Sex-lethal auto-regulatory feedback to reinforce a male-specific gene expression pattern was selected for a talk.
The conference also was the perfect opportunity to catch up with colleagues many of which have become close friends over the years – the RNA society truly has become my scientific family!
An EMBO practical course on Measuring Translation Dynamics by Ribosome Profiling is coming up in May 2020. Fantastic speakers are supporting the course including Nicholas Ingolia (University of California, Berkeley, USA), Rachel Green (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA), Thomas Preiss (The Australian National University, Canberra, AU), Anne Willis (University of Cambridge, UK), Marina Rodnina (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, DE), and Gerben Menschaert (BIOBIX, University of Ghent, BE). The Couse is organized by Sebastian Leidel, Pavel Baranov and Jan Medenbach and will include numerous lectures as well as hands-on training on how to perform ribosome profiling experiments and how to analyze the data. More information will be available soon on the EMBL courses website.
We could successfully extend funding of the Collaborative Research Centre 960 (SFB960) ‘RNP biogenesis: assembly of ribosomal and non-ribosomal RNPs and control of their function’. To continue our ambitious research programs, we are now seeking highly motivated PhD students. We offer a highly competitive research environment and exciting research projects. For more information click here.
Mutations that alter the activity of RNA-binding proteins or their abundance have been implicated in numerous diseases such as neurodegenerative disorders and various types of cancer. This highlights the importance of RBP proteostasis and the necessity to tightly control the expression levels and activities of RBPs. In many cases, RBPs engage in an auto-regulatory feedback by directly binding to and influencing the fate of their own mRNAs, exerting control over their own expression.
Together with our colleagues Michaela Müller-McNicoll from the Institute of Cell Biology and Neuroscience at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Oliver Rossbach from the Institute of Biochemistry at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, and Jingyi Hiu at the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology (CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology), we have reviewed RBP-mediated autogenous feedback regulation in eukaryotic organisms. For this feedback control, RBPs employ a variety of mechanisms operating at all levels of post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression to either to maintain protein abundance within a physiological range (exerting negative feedback) or to enforce and stabilize cell fate decisions through generation of binary, genetic on/off switches.
The article has just been published in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology – click here to read the full version.
Good news: the SFB 960 ‘RNP biogenesis: assembly of ribosomes and non-ribosomal RNPs and control of their function’ has been granted another funding period. We are grateful for the generous support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) that will allow us and our colleagues to continue and extend our scientific programs and to ensure further top-level education of PhD students within the Graduate Research Academy RNA Biology. We want to thank all reviewers that were involved in the selection process and we are looking forward to another four years of exciting science!
A news article on this topic can also be found on the homepage of the University of Regensburg (in German): DFG verlängert Regensburger Sonderforschungsbereich zur Ribosomen-Entstehung
A collaborative effort lead by Björn Tews and supported by the research consortium ‘Systems Biology of the Unfolded Protein Response in Glioma’ (SUPR-G, generously funded by the BMBF in the framework of the e:med initiative) has resulted in a recent publication in Acta Neuropathologica that demonstrates a function of the peptide SPARC in migration and infiltrative growth of glioblastoma cells. SPARC production and secretion is enhanced via regulation of the UPR sensor IRE1 via AKT. SPARC secretion then prevents Nogo-A from inhibiting migration via RhoA. Advanced ultramicroscopy in undissected mouse brains reveals that gliomas require SPARC for invading into white matter structures and its depletion reduces tumor dissemination which significantly prolongs survival and improves response to cytostatic therapy. The discovery of a novel RhoA-IRE1 axis now provides a druggable target for interfering with SPARC production and underscores its therapeutic value. The full publiation can be accessed here.
