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Press Release No. 36 December 23, 2015 Berlin

📺 Changing Architecture: A new understanding of the spatial organization of our genome

It has now been 15 years since scientists celebrated the completion of the human genome. At that point, scientists had determined the entire sequence of the genetic letters making up our DNA. It is now known that this was only an initial step in a long journey: in addition to the chemical letters, information is also encoded in the manner in which the DNA is packed inside the cell nucleus. A research team led by Ana Pombo from the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin-Buch, in collaboration with international colleagues from Italy, Canada and Great Britain, has now generated comprehensive 3D maps of the spatial organization of the mouse genome, from embryonic stem cells to fully developed neurons. The work has been published in the journal Molecular Systems Biology. In the future such maps might help track down genes that are involved in hereditary diseases.

Watching the ribosome at work

A new statistical method could help to clarify the function of unknown genes. A research team under Uwe Ohler of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) at the MDC has adapted and tested a filter method from speech signal processing that makes sequencing data more interpretable. First author of the study in Nature Methods is Lorenzo Calviello. “We can use this to watch the ribosome at work”, says group leader Ohler.

Sudden cardiac death: large study to improve risk assessment

One of the most common causes of sudden cardiac death in young people is a genetic condition known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). However, it is difficult to assess the risk of sudden cardiac death among people with this condition using current methods. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a large-scale study that should considerably improve risk assessment in this area. The Outpatient Clinic for Cardiology at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC) of the MDC in the Helmholtz Association and of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin is leading the clinical trials being conducted at participating German research centers with MRI expertise.

Neurodermatitis genes influence other allergies

There’s a typical "career" for some allergic people, and it starts very early on the skin: babies develop atopic dermatitis, food allergies may follow, then comes asthma and later on hay fever. A group of scientists led by Ingo Marenholz and Young-Ae Lee at the MDC, working with colleagues from several institutions, has now identified seven genetic risk loci for this course of disease.

From Vancouver to Berlin: W3 Professorship for Bioinformatician Irmtraud Meyer at the FU Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center

The bioinformatician Irmtraud Meyer of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has accepted the appointment to a W3 professorship for “Bioinformatics of the RNA Structure and Transcriptome Regulation” at the Freie Universität Berlin (FU) in cooperation with the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC). The two institutions have thus succeeded in recruiting an internationally recognized scientist to Berlin and to strengthen the field of systems biology and systems medicine. Professor Meyer will begin her work in Berlin during this winter term and thus return to Germany after 16 years of research abroad.

Full Professorship for Dr. Wei Chen from the MDC

Geneticist and genome researcher Dr. Wei Chen of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) at the MDC has become full professor for “Functional Genomics and Systems Biology” at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Professor Chen also heads a research group at the BIMSB in addition to the central core facility “Genomics“, which he has set up during the past few years.

RNA-binding Protein Influences Key Mediator of Cellular Inflammation and Stress Responses

Messenger (mRNA) molecules are a key component of protein biosynthesis. They are first transcribed as a “working copy” of the DNA and then translated into protein molecules. RNA-binding proteins such as RC3H1 (also known as ROQUIN) regulate the degradation of the mRNA molecules and thus prevent the production of specific proteins. Researchers at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) have now shown that ROQUIN binds several thousand mRNA molecules. They demonstrated that ROQUIN also influences the gene regulator NF-kappaB, a key mediator of cellular inflammation and stress responses (Nature Communications, Article number: 7367)*.