News

Enno Klußmann of the Max Delbrück Center aims to help reducing the harmful consequences of high blood pressure by imitating a rare mutation. His plan to activate a specific enzyme called PDE3A to protect the heart and kidneys is now being funded with €400,000 by the Else Kröner-Fresenius Foundation.

Researchers at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center of Max Delbrück Center and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have found that microbial communities in the mouse GI tract are unevenly distributed, which influences immune cell populations. The work was published in “Gut Microbes.”

Researchers in Berlin and Düsseldorf have implicated a new gene in the progression of Huntington’s disease in a brain organoid model. The gene may contribute to brain abnormalities much earlier than previously thought. The study was published in “Nature Communications.”

Three Max Delbrück post-docs have won Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships of €174,000 each. They will study how we perceive wetness, the structure of a mitochondrial protein, and integrate bioelectronics into neuromuscular organoids respectively.

Preeclampsia is one of the most common pregnancy-related complications. Florian Herse of the Max Delbrück Center and Martin Gauster of the Medical University of Graz are studying the role that Hofbauer cells play in the disorder. They have been awarded a D-A-CH grant totaling €700,000 for their research.

Neuroscientists Gary Lewin and James Poulet at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine have won highly coveted and competitive ERC Advanced Grants to study pain and the neural mechanisms that underlie temperature perception.

Touch is a fundamental, yet scarcely understood, sense. Now, the team led by Gary Lewin at the Max Delbrück Center has discovered a second ion channel associated with touch perception. Elkin1 could be a target for pain therapy, the team writes in “Science”.

Special receptor cells under the skin enable us to feel pain and touch. But Schwann cells also play a key role in detecting such stimuli, researchers at the Max Delbrück Center report in “Nature Communications.” This discovery opens new avenues for pain therapy.

Melissa Birol of the Max Delbrück Center is looking to understand early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Her focus is on the interplay between the lipid metabolism of nerve cells and the spread of tau protein. The Alzheimer Research Initiative is funding her work with 193,500 euros.

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.