European million grants for three DKFZ researchers

Established in 2007, the European Research Council (ERC) supports fundamental research with the goal of promoting visionary projects and opening up new interdisciplinary fields of research. For excellent established researchers, the ERC has annual calls for proposals for its Advanced Grants, which are awarded in a highly competitive scheme. "It is a tremendous success for the DKFZ that three of our scientists at once have been selected in this year's round of calls," said Michael Baumann, Chairman of the Management Board of the DKFZ.

Hans-Reimer Rodewald leads the Division of Cellular Immunology at the DKFZ. He is interested in the "family relationships" of cells in the immune system. In order to find out which processes underlie the formation and maintenance of immune system tissues, Rodewald and his co-workers developed a "barcode system". To this end, the scientists constructed a "genetic chance generator". As a result, cells that have been labeled in this way exhibit in their genome an artificial, neutral code that they pass on to their offspring. This facilitates conclusions about how tissues or cell lines are generated. "In this way, we found out that some blood stem cells in the bone marrow produce many different cell types while others generate only a few," said Rodewald. With his team, he now plans to use and enhance the barcode system with the goal of uncovering the secrets of the composition of various tissues in the body. The principle of this experiment may also help elucidate the family relationships of cells in other organs such as the brain or the liver, or to differentiate between a primary tumor and metastases in experimental models.

Tobias Dick leads the Division of Redox Regulation at the DKFZ. He investigates how hydrogen peroxide and other oxidants in the cells act as chemical messengers. "These molecules facilitate, for example, rapid responses to stress conditions," the biochemist explained. With his team, he has already been able to prove that oxidants in stress situations do not move freely in the cell; instead, they are caught by special proteins that transmit the signal via a cascade of other proteins to a specific target. "The ERC Grant will now enable us to study and comprehend the whole complexity of these so-called redox signaling pathways," said Dick, who is very pleased about the grant comprising €2 million. "Ultimately, it may become possible to specifically attack disrupted signaling pathways such as in a cancer cell."

Bernd Bukau leads the joint research department "Chaperones and Proteases" of the Center for Molecular Biology in Heidelberg (ZMBH) and the DKFZ. Bukau, a molecular biologist, is also the director of the DKFZ-ZMBH Alliance, which over the past ten years has closely linked molecular cell research activities of both institutes. Bukau is studying how the cell produces proteins. He sketched out the main goal of his group's research program: "Ribosomes use individual amino acids to synthesize polypeptide chains. We want to find out how they are subsequently given their three-dimensional structure and how several proteins are assembled into the active protein complexes." Talking about the EU funding, he added: "With the ERC Grant, we plan to uncover the molecular mechanisms of this process in the yeast model system and in human cells. We are very happy that the ERC grant will now enable us to provide answers to these pivotal research questions."

An image of the three grant recipients is available for download at:
www.dkfz.de/de/presse/pressemitteilungen/2017/bilder/erc-grants.jpg

Caption: From left to right: Bernd Bukau, Hans-Reimer Rodewald, Tobias Dick

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