Press Releases

Major international event in Berlin generates collaboration between 16 countries: The RSPCA and the MDC are bringing together experts from 16 countries to reduce the number of lab animals experiencing severe suffering.

A research team led by Gary Lewin has now discovered that Piezo channels are highly sensitive to changes in membrane voltage.

Medical imaging has an unavoidable side effect: MRI machines generate heat. Thoralf Niendorf has now been awarded an ERC Advanced grant to turn this feature into a tool to study the role of temperature in animal bodies. A second ERC Advanced Grant goes to Thomas Jentsch, who will explore the functions of ion channels in health and disease.

As blood vessels grow, the cells that compose them must make a choice between forming side-branches or expanding the vessel surface and increasing its diameter. Now Prof. Holger Gerhardt at the MDC and his international research teams have made a crucial disovery about this process: the cells can behave as a collective, moving in the same direction together.

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.

On January 29th, the European Animal Research Association (EARA) and Charité –Universitätsmedizin Berlin, in collaboration with the Max Delbrück Center and Freie Universität Berlin, invite those working in the life science sector to discuss the need for greater transparency in animal research.

The MDC researcher Jan Philipp Junker and his team have used CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to pioneer a technique capable of determining both the type and origin of all the cells in an organism. They describe their method in Nature Biotechnology.

An ultimate goal of neurobiological research is to understand how a brain integrates a constant flow...