EU-LIFE launches LIBRA - Top European research institutes move towards gender equality
LIBRA – the EU-LIFE alliance project to develop and implement gender equality in research – has been launched. The kick off meeting of this H2020 funded project took place on 27-28 October 2015 at Sitges, Spain. CeMM is one of the thirteen partners, who are going to contribute to the design and implementation of harmonised and tailored Gender Equality Plans at the research institutes’ level. Approximately half of the PhD students in Europe are…
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases
We congratulate Kaan Boztug and his team whose proposal for the establishment of a Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases has been selected for funding out of 26 applications! Kaan Boztug is Principal Investigator at CeMM and Associate Professor at the Medical University of Vienna. He is a specialist in Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, focusing his research on rare diseases in the field of immunology and hematology. In…
Essential genes for the survival of human cells
In a combined effort researchers of Thijn Brummelkamp´s group at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) and the groups of Giulio Superti-Furga, Jacques Colinge (presently at the Institut de Recherche en Cancérologie de Montpellier), and Keiryn Bennett at CeMM identified about 1.700 genes being important for the survival of human cells. By conducting large scale mutagenesis analysis on two haploid human cell lines they found that approximately 10…
5th SMART Lecture by Albert-László Barabási
On October 12th, we had the great pleasure to host Albert-László Barabási at CeMM. After several rounds of meetings with PhD students and faculty, as well as a stimulating discussion with invited artists in the brain lounge, Albert-László Barabási delivered the 5th SMART lecture. His talk on “Network Science: From the WWW to Human Diseases” attracted an exceptional audience of some 150 people. After a general introduction and welcome note by…
Thank you to Rectorate of the Medical University of Vienna
CeMM would like to welcome the new Rector of the Medical University of Vienna, Prof. Dr. Markus Müller, and his team, and takes the occasion to thank the former Rector, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schütz, for his continues support over the last years. Rector Schütz played a crucial role in the development of CeMM, its location in the middle of the medical campus, and set the path for a fruitful collaboration, being always open for new ideas and…
A “hot” approach for understanding drug action and identifying new drug targets
How do successful drugs actually work? And how can we identify new targets for drug discovery to enable the development of novel potential therapeutics? A key challenge for scientists in academia and the pharmaceutical industry is to find out how small molecules such as drugs or cellular metabolites act within a cell – who are the mediators and effectors required for a drug or metabolite to exert their effect e.g. on cell proliferation, shape…
Festive Lecture by George Church
How new genomic technologies will impact us all On 17 September 2015 a festive lecture held by geneticist George Church (Harvard Medical School) marked the beginning the GET Global Conference, hosted by CeMM in the context of Genom Austria. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Personal Genome Project, the conference brought together pioneers of personal genome sequencing and open science, discussing technological advances and associated…
Obituary William E. Paul
It is with great sadness that we learn of the decease of Prof. Dr. William E. Paul, Chief of the Laboratory of Immunology, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, USA. Bill Paul was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of CeMM from the very beginning and had a great influence on the development of our institute. We lose an extraordinary scientist and highly esteemed mentor. His advice, constructive criticism and…
Visit of H.E. Sergio Mattarella and H.E. Heinz Fischer at CeMM
On September 16, 2015 CeMM was honored by the visit of H.E. Sergio Mattarella, President of the Republic of Italy, and H.E. Heinz Fischer, President of the Republic of Austria. It was the first official visit of President Mattarella to Austria and we are very grateful for this unique opportunity to present CeMM and its research highlights to such an honorable audience. The visit started with a short introduction to CeMM’s art façade created by…
ChIPmentation: fast, robust, low-input ChIP-seq for histones and transcription factors
To understand how genes are regulated, researchers create genome-wide maps that connect regulatory proteins to their target sites on the DNA. This analysis is typically performed using “chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing” (ChIP-seq). With this method, the cell’s chromosomes are cut into small pieces, and an antibody is used to fish out those DNA fragments that are bound by the regulatory protein of interest. Unfortunately,…
An international group of laboratories, led by CeMM, publishes in Cell the scientific arguments for more systematic research on solute carriers proteins, the major class of drug transporters
Recent scientific insights and technical breakthroughs strongly argue for a global, efficient approach to map the gene products that manage the interface between biological systems and their environment. The proteins that transport nutrients and drugs across cellular membranes into cells and organisms have paradoxically not been studied in an orderly, efficient fashion, despite their clear importance. Recent work at CeMM on regulation of the…
www.ChemicalProbes.org, a new crowdsourcing initiative
The Superti-Furga laboratory at CeMM is part of a new crowdsourcing initiative, a wiki site called www.chemicalprobes.org that recommends appropriate chemical probes for biological targets, provides guidance on their use, and documents their limitations. Chemical probes are chemical tool compounds that enable scientists to study proteins in living cells without genetic modifications and which may be interesting drug targets to treat diseases like…
New epigenetic target and drug in leukemia
Through the investigation of specific interaction partners of the leukemia-associated, truncated variant of C/EBPa, the research group of Giulio Superti-Furga, Scientific Director at CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has gained new mechanistic insights into the molecular details of oncogenic transformation by C/EBPa mutant proteins. Florian Grebien, postdoctoral fellow in Superti-Furga´s team and…
Scientists at CeMM discover a new fundamental feature in the organization of biological matter
An unexpected order in the molecular regulation of the constituents of the fat part of our cells is revealed in two simultaneous publications appearing from the laboratory of Prof. Giulio Superti-Furga in the renowned scientific journals Cell and Cell Reports. The two studies, from scientists at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences investigated the role of lipids in the immune response. Marielle…
Inherited DOCK2 deficiency in patients with early-onset invasive bacterial and viral infections
In an international study scientists from Kaan Boztug´s team at CeMM and the Medical University of Vienna, in close collaboration with the groups of Luigi Notarangelo at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Jean-Laurent Casanova at Rockefeller University, New York , have elucidated the molecular cause of a hitherto unrecognized inherited disorder of the immune system (primary immunodeficiency). Performing genetic and cellular immunological studies,…
