Archive

On the 1st and 2nd of October the first self-organized PhD student’s symposium took place online. We had more than 50 members of the Biology department including faculty, post-docs and doctoral students attend the Symposium every day.

Professor Gerhard Thiel has been elected as a member of the Academia Europaea . The Academia Europaea is a European non-governmental scientific society founded in 1988. Its goal is to promote academic excellence in a variety of scientific disciplines and to further the development of public education in the scientific fields represented in the Academy. The members come from all over Europe. The election of the new members represents an award: After inviting potential candidates, a review committee makes the decision on acceptance in a strict peer review process; the election is confirmed by the Council of the Society. Gerhard Thiel is a member of the Section Physiology & Neuroscience (Class Life Sciences) of the Academia Europaea. At the TU Darmstadt he is head of the Membrane Biophysics Department in the Department of Biology; he is also a researcher at the Centre for Synthetic Biology at the TU.

The ion channel forming envelope protein of SARS-CoV2 is a promising target for the development of virostatic drugs

Within the LOEWE project iNAPO, researchers of the Thiel and Bertl working groups at the TU Darmstadt focused on the structure and function of viral ion channels. Shortly after the outbreak of the CoVID-19 pandemic, the scientists became aware of a protein of the SARS -CoV2- virus that may have an ion channel function: the envelope (E) protein. In analogy to an already known protein from SARS -CoV1, the so-called envelope (E) protein from SARS -CoV2 is also suspected of conducting ions across membranes and thus interfering with the ion balance of the host cell. Since this protein is involved in the formation of virus particles and in the budding of mature virus particles from the host cells, the E protein is a promising target for the development of virostatic drugs.

In Genomstudien wurden in der jüngsten Vergangenheit einige Schlüsselproteine entdeckt, die bei Fehlfunktion zur Ausprägung der Parkinson Krankheit führen.

We welcome our new colleague, Prof. Dr. Torsten Waldminghaus. We are looking forward to working with you! Torsten Waldminghaus will establish his group at our department on the topic of bacterial (synthetic) chromosome biology and is part of the newly founded center for Synthetic Biology

M.Sc. Jan P. Bogen hat in einer Feierstunde am 28. Februar 2020 den Masterpreis 2019 der Gesellschaft für Biochemie und Molekularbiologie (GBM) erhalten.

Dr. Sascha Hein (AG Simon) erhielt anlässlich der Jahrestagung der Vereinigung für Allgemeine und Angewandte Mikrobiologie (VAAM) am 8. März 2020 in Leipzig einen der vier jährlich verliehenen..