Press releases

Thomas Rachel, Member of the Bundestag and Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister of Education and Research, officially opened the new Oxide Cluster at Forschungszentrum Jülich today. The new laboratory at the Peter Grünberg Institute provides scientists with unique opportunities to investigate electronic materials for a new generation of memories and processors. Jülich project leader Prof. Regina Dittmann coordinated the three-year construction of the Oxide Cluster, in which funds totalling some € 3.7 million were invested, including dedicated funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research worth € 940,000.

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Cells have a sophisticated system to control and dispose of defective, superfluous proteins and thus to prevent damage to the body. Dr. Katrin Bagola and Professor Thomas Sommer of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch as well as Professor Michael Glickman and Professor Aaron Ciechanover of Technion, the Technical University of Israel in Haifa, have now discovered a new function of an enzyme that is involved in this vital process. Using yeast cells as a model organism, the researchers showed that a specific factor, abbreviated Cue1, is not only a receptor and activator for a component of the degradation apparatus, but also contributes to ensuring that the defective protein is marked with a molecular tag for degradation (Molecular Cell, doi: org/10.1016/j.molcel.2013.04.005)*.

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In Parkinson’s disease, the protein “alpha-synuclein” aggregates and accumulates within neurons. Specific areas of the brain become progressively affected as the disease develops and advances. The mechanism underlying this pathological progression is poorly understood but could result from spreading of the protein (or abnormal forms of it) along nerve projections connecting lower to upper brain regions. Scientists at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Bonn have developed a novel experimental model that reproduces for the first time this pattern of alpha-synuclein brain spreading and provides important clues on the mechanisms underlying this pathological process. They triggered the production of human alpha-synuclein in the lower rat brain and were able to trace the spreading of this protein toward higher brain regions. The new experimental paradigm could promote the development of ways to halt or slow down disease development in humans. The research team headed by Prof. Donato Di Monte presents these results in the scientific journal “EMBO Molecular Medicine”.

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The German Aerospace Centre (DLR) is devising plans for a solar power research and test centre in Morocco on behalf of the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (Masen).

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The chemistry of life is built on left-handed and right-handed molecules that can have completely different functions. A novel technique, developed by researchers from the US and Germany, can reliably tell these mirror molecules apart. The new method can in principle even detect the two variants in mixtures of substances, as the team report in the current cover story of the scientific journal “Nature”. The procedure also holds promise for the development of a technique to separate left- from right-handed variants of a molecule, write David Patterson and John Doyle of Harvard University together with Melanie Schnell of the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science CFEL in Hamburg, Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for nuclear physics in Heidelberg, Germany. CFEL is a joint venture of DESY, the Max Planck society and the University of Hamburg.

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