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Heidelberg, 29 December 2006
Roadworks on the motorways of the cell
A cell is a busy place. In a permanent
rush hour, molecules are transported along a dynamic
motorway system made up of filaments called microtubules.
Microtubules constantly grow and shrink and are rapidly assembled
wherever a cargo needs to go, but during this transportation
process they need to be kept stable. Researchers from the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] have discovered
for the first time that a protein stabilises microtubules by
binding to their weakest part, the so-called lattice seam. The
study, which appears in this week's issue of the journal Cell, also
suggests that the protein creates a special surface along the seam
that offers an alternative track for transportation.
Brussels, 14 December 2006
Magna Carta for Researchers
Today, Janez
Potočnik, European Commissioner for Science and
Research, received a statement of support for the
European Charter for Researchers and the Code of
Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers from
EIROforum.
Hinxton, 11 December 2006
Better, faster, easier – EMBL-EBI launches its
new website with powerful search engine
Today the European
Molecular Biology Laboratory's European
Bioinformatics Institute [EMBL-EBI] launches its
new, faster and easier website with an exhaustive
search engine at its centre. The web interface has been
streamlined on the basis of user feedback from a recent
extensive survey, giving a new homepage that brings
users, within one click, to the service they need.
Behind this new web interface lies the 'EB-eye', a powerful
search engine allowing instant searches of all the
EBI's databases from a single query.
Hinxton, 4 December 2006
Europe and India join forces to make more
biological models available for research
The BioModels
Database, hosted by the European Molecular Biology
Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute
[EMBL-EBI] in Cambridge, UK, has entered a formal
data-exchange agreement with the Database of
Quantitative Chemical Signalling [DOQCS] of the
National Centre for Biological Sciences [NCBS] in
Bangalore, India.
Hinxton, 27 November 2006
CiteXplore – integrating biomedical literature
and data
Today the European
Molecular Biology Laboratory's European
Bioinformatics Institute [EMBL-EBI] launches
CiteXplore, a new freely accessible literature resource
service.
Monterotondo, 2 November 2006
Helping muscle regenerate
Muscle wasting can occur at all ages as the result of genetic defects, heart failure, spinal injury or cancer. A therapy to cure the loss of muscle mass and strength, which has a severe impact on patients' lives, is desperately sought. Blocking a central signal molecule, researchers from the Mouse Biology Unit of the EMBL in Monterotondo, Italy, have now found a way to protect muscle from degenerating after injury and to improve muscle healing in mice.
Heidelberg, 6 October 2006
Giving European science a headstart through training
Today, the German Minister for Education and Research, Annette Schavan, breaks ground for the new training and conference centre for the life sciences that will be built on the EMBL campus in Heidelberg.
Heidelberg, 27 September 2006
How nature tinkers with the cellular clock
The life of a cell is all about
growing and dividing at the right time. A control
system with several layers adjusts when key components of the
cell cycle machinery are produced, activated and degraded to
make sure that the schedule is kept. These layers of control work
differently and are usually studied separately, but researchers at
the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] and the
Technical University of Denmark [DTU] have now discovered
that they change in a highly coordinated fashion during evolution.
Heidelberg, 7 September 2006
New EMBL/CRG Research Unit for Systems Biology launched today
Today the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL], the Centre for Genomic Regulation [CRG] and the Spanish Ministry for Education and Science [MEC] officially launch their new joint EMBL/CRG Research Unit in Systems Biology on the campus of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park. The Spanish Ministry for Education and Science will fund the new unit with 12.7 million Euros over the next nine years.
Monterotondo, 3 September 2006
Lost in the labyrinth
Blood cells have limited lifespans, which means that they must be continually replaced by calling up reserves and turning these into the blood cell types needed by the body. Claus Nerlov and his colleagues at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] unit in Monterotondo, Italy, in collaboration with researchers from Sten Eirik Jacobsen's laboratory at the University of Lund in Sweden, have now uncovered how an intracellular communication pathway contributes to this process.
Heidelberg, 28 August 2006
A switch between life and death
Cells in an embryo divide
at an amazing rate to build a whole body, but this
growth needs to be controlled. Otherwise the result may
be defects in embryonic development or cancer in
adults. Controlling growth requires that some cells
divide while others die; their fates are determined by signals
that are passed from molecule to molecule within
the cell. Researchers at the European Molecular Biology
Laboratory [EMBL] in Heidelberg have now discovered
how one of these signaling pathways controls the life
and death of cells in the fruit fly. The study will be published
in this week's issue of the journal Cell.
Heidelberg, 25 August 2006
A wandering eye
Eyes are among the earliest recognisable structures in an embryo; they start off as bulges on the sides of tube-shaped tissue that will eventually become the brain. Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] in Heidelberg have now discovered that cells are programmed to make eyes early in development and individually migrate to the right place to do so. The study, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, overturns the textbook model of the process and suggests that also other organs might be formed by the movement of single cells rather than sheets of entire tissues.
Heidelberg, 9 August 2006
EMBL scientists found start-up company to
develop anti-cancer drugs
Today EMBL scientists, EMBL's
commercial affiliate, EMBL Enterprise Management Technology
Transfer GmbH [EMBLEM] and EMBL's venture vehicle, EMBL
Ventures GmbH, announce the foundation of Elara
Pharmaceuticals GmbH, a start-up company that will translate
basic research findings into new anti-cancer drugs. Elara is a spinout
company dedicated to drug development and will follow-up
on promising small molecule leads that have shown powerful
anti-cancer actions in screening experiments. Elara receives seed
funding from EMBL Ventures and has been granted exclusive
license rights to selected discoveries made at EMBL.
Monterotondo/Göttingen, 6 August 2006
Alleviating the burden of Multiple Sclerosis
Depression, coordination
and speech problems, muscle weakness and disability are
just a few of the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis [MS].
Researchers from the Mouse Biology Unit of the European
Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] in Italy and the
Department of Neuropathology at the Faculty of Medicine,
University of Göttingen, Germany, have now discovered that
these symptoms are aggravated by a specific signal in cells in the
nervous system. The study, which will appear in this week's
online issue of Nature Immunology, suggests that blocking the
proteins that regulate the signal might be an efficient strategy for
new therapies against MS.
Hinxton, 31 July 2006
EMBL-EBI and collaborators win bid to run UK
PubMed Central
Scientists will be able to access a vast
collection of biomedical research at the touch of a button
thanks to a major new initiative that aims to promote the free
transfer of ideas in a bid to speed up scientific discovery. Based
on a model currently used in the United States, UK PubMed
Central [UKPMC] will provide free access to an online digital
archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and
life sciences.
Hamburg, 11 July 2006
Mapping the protein world
In the early days of X-ray crystallography obtaining a three-dimensional model of a protein required wire models, screws, bolts and years of tedious calculations by hand. Today macromolecular models are built by computers – thanks to sophisticated software and in particular a package called ARP/wARP.
Heidelberg/Zagreb, 29 June 2006
Croatia becomes EMBL's 19th Member State
Croatia has officially joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] as the organisation's 19th Member State. Today, the Croatian parliament ratified its membership after EMBL's council had accepted the country's application.
Grenoble, 16 June 2006
Cracking a virus protection shield
Ebola, measles and rabies are serious threats to public health in developing countries. Despite different symptoms all of the diseases are caused by the same class of viruses that unlike most other living beings carry their genetic information on a single RNA molecule instead of a double strand of DNA. Now researchers from the Institut de Virologie Moléculaire et Structurale [IVMS] and the Outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] in Grenoble have obtained a detailed structural picture of a protein that allows the rabies virus to withstand the human immune response and survive and replicate in our cells.
Hamburg/Berlin, 29 May 2006
New potential drug target in tuberculosis
Tuberculosis remains one of the
deadliest threats to public health. Roughly one third of the world's
population is infected and more and more bacterial strains have
developed resistance to drugs. Researchers from the Hamburg
Outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory
[EMBL] and the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology
[MPIIB] in Berlin have now obtained a structural image of a protein
that the bacterium needs for survival in human cells.
Hinxton, 3 May 2006
Free access to world-class biological databases
for European science thanks to FELICS
Today the European Molecular
Biology Laboratory's [EMBL] European Bioinformatics
Institute [EBI], the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics [SIB], the
University of Cologne, Germany, and the European Patent
Office launch FELICS [Free European Life-science
Information and Computational Services]. The new project
will give researchers unrestricted access to some of the world's
most important biological databases.
Hinxton, 25 April 2006
A brighter future for Europe's favourite molecular biology software package
EMBOSS, the European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite, has received a vital funding boost from the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [BBSRC] that will guarantee its continued maintenance under an open source license for the next three years. This ends two years of uncertainty over the future of the project.
Monterotondo/Harefield/London, 10 April 2006
Getting to the heart of cardiovascular diseases
Today
three research organisations announce the merging of their
expertise to fight cardiovascular diseases, which are among the
most common health problems and causes of death in the
world. The Magdi Yacoub Institute [MYI] at the UK's
Harefield Heart Science Centre, Imperial College London, and
a unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL]
near Rome will work together to connect discoveries in basic
research to new therapies and treatments.
Heidelberg, 5 April 2006
With joint forces against Malaria
Today the network of excellence
for Biology and Pathology of the Malaria Parasite
[BioMalPar], will bring together the world's elite in the field of
Malaria research at the European Molecular Biology
Laboratory [EMBL] in Heidelberg. At the second annual
BioMalPar conference, organised jointly by Institut Pasteur
Paris [France], Leiden University Medical Centre [The
Netherlands], Imperial College London [UK] and the
University of Heidelberg [Germany], some of the most eminent
experts address the hot questions around Malaria and
present their newest research findings.
Heidelberg, 28 March 2006
Bringing science out of the lab into the classroom
Science is moving more rapidly than ever; one groundbreaking discovery chases the next at an incredible speed. School teachers have trouble keeping up with the pace, and many pupils call science classes "boring". Today, Europe's major research organisations launch Science in School, the first international, multidisciplinary journal for innovative science teaching, to provide a platform for communication between science teachers, practising scientists and other stakeholders in science education.
Heidelberg, 16 March 2006
A balancing act between the sexes
Recent research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] reveals new insights into how cells achieve equality between the sexes. A new link discovered between the membrane surrounding the nucleus and the male X-chromosome in fruit flies may play a crucial role in determining how active certain genes are.
Heidelberg, 2 March 2006
A new tree of life allows a closer look at the
origin of species
In 1870 the German
scientist Ernst Haeckel mapped the evolutionary
relationships of plants and animals in the first 'tree of life'.
Since then scientists have continuously redrawn and
expanded the tree adding microorganisms and using
modern molecular data, yet, many parts of the tree have
remained unclear. Now a group at the European
Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] in Heidelberg has
developed a computational method that resolves many of
the open questions and produced what is likely the most
accurate tree ever.
Grenoble, 16 February 2006
Waking a sleeping virus
A detailed structural
picture of a molecule that plays a key role in activating the
Epstein Barr Virus in human cells has now been obtained
by researchers at the European Molecular Biology
Laboratory [EMBL] and the Institut de Virologie
Moléculaire et Structurale [IVMS], associated with the
Université Joseph Fourier and the CNRS in Grenoble.
Heidelberg,
22 January 2006
The closest look ever at the cell's machines
Today researchers in Germany announce they have finished the first complete analysis of the "molecular machines" in one of biology's most important model organisms: S. cerevisiae [baker's yeast]. The study from the biotechnology company Cellzome, in collaboration with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL], appears in this week's online edition of Nature.
Hamburg,
11 January 2006
The giant protein titin helps build muscles
Imagine grabbing two snakes by the tail so that they can't wriggle off in opposite directions. Scientists at the Hamburg Outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] and collaborators from King's College in London have now discovered that something similar happens to a protein that is crucial in the formation of muscle tissue. Their work appears in the current issue of the journal Nature.
Grenoble,
10 January 2006
A major European
Centre for Structural Biology inaugurated in Grenoble
On Friday, 13 January 2006, the new Carl-Ivar Brändén Building [CIBB] will be inaugurated on the Polygone Scientifique Campus in Grenoble, France. The CIBB will be operated as a collaboration between major international and national partners based in Grenoble and is a further step in the development of the region as a European centre of excellence for structural biology. |
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