Physiology

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”.

To perform coordinated movements, we rely on special sensory neurons in our muscles and joints. Without them, the brain wouldn’t know what the rest of our body was doing. A team led by Niccolò Zampieri has studied their molecular markers to better understand how they work and describes the results in “Nature Communications”.

Yoichiro Sugimoto has headed the MDC lab “Molecular mechanisms of environment sensing” since July 2022. His team investigates how cells respond to changes in oxygen levels in their environment and what role disturbances to this system play in certain diseases.

The acid-sensitive chloride ion channel ASOR is found in almost all our cells. But apart from its involvement in cell death, not much is known about its physiological role. Now, the Jentsch Lab at FMP and MDC reports astonishing insights about its structure and activation mechanisms in “Science Advances”.

The Berlin-based physician and researcher Kai Schmidt-Ott is investigating the causes of kidney failure and working to develop new methods to better diagnose and treat kidney diseases. The German Society of Nephrology has now recognized his research achievements with the 2021 Franz Volhard Award, which includes a €10,000 cash prize.

The potassium channel KCNQ3 is required for our brain to generate accurate spatial maps. Defects in this channel have measurable effects on the internal navigation system of mice, reports a research team led by Thomas Jentsch of the FMP and MDC in the journal “Nature Communications”.

The transport of ions such as sodium, potassium and chloride in human cells is essential for survival. Professor Thomas Jentsch has been researching the various transport pathways for decades. Now he has discovered another disease gene that he and his team describe in the “American Journal of Human Genetics".

Theoretical physicists from Berlin teamed up with experimental physicists from Munich to determine the precise mechanics involved in cell motility. The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The neuroscientist Dr. James Poulet has been appointed to the W3 professorship for Systems Neuroscience at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in cooperation with the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC). Professor Poulet took up the post on April 1, 2020.

An MDC research team has discovered surprising new properties in fluconazole, a long approved fungal drug. The substance helps to draw water from urine. The researchers found this in rodents. The fungicide could help patients with rare genetic diseases in whom the water transport of the kidneys is impaired. Nevertheless, the path to therapy is not easy.