News

Jan Philipp Junker creates cell lineage trees. He wants to understand the different paths that lead to a functioning organism. Perhaps one day, this knowledge will also reveal how organs are able to regenerate.

MDC researchers established a new model to study neuromuscular development and disorders. For the first time two distinct human tissues co-developed in the lab from one progenitor cell type and self-organized into a complex, functional neuromuscular organoid.

Some 27 young researchers have been selected for the prestigious EMBO Young Investigators Programme. Among this year’s awardees is Philipp Junker, a systems biologist at the MDC’s Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology.

When a muscle grows or a muscle injury heals, some of the stem cells develop into new muscle cells. A research team at the MDC led by Carmen Birchmeier has now described in the journal “Genes and Development” how this process is regulated by two proteins produced in an oscillatory manner.

Switching off “safeguard” genes improves cell reprogramming, aiding future regenerative therapies.

The conference “Muscle Development, Regeneration and Disease 2018” took place at the MDC in late April. This event has in recent years become an increasingly important international platform for muscle research.

MDC researchers have described how the heart forms itself into a its characteristic S-shape and how the ventricles and atria finally develop. Their findings will help to better understand congenital heart diseases.

The Human Frontier Science Program is now funding a joint research project conducted by teams from BIMSB/MDC, LMU Munich, and the University of Southern California that aims to find out exactly how the DNA's enhancer region work.

Reliably predicting the onset and trajectory of a disease might seem like a distant dream. But a European consortium is aiming to achieve exactly this using a set of emerging technologies with the analysis of single cells at their core.