The brain's immune system works more simply than expected

Freiburg researchers find common patterns of immune defense in human brain tissue and in a mouse model

31-Mar-2026 - Diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis or brain tumors progress very differently. Nevertheless, the immune defense of the human brain uses similar reaction patterns. Researchers from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Freiburg, together with an international team, have ...

Genome research is getting faster: AI tool identifies genes in newly sequenced organisms—without lab tests

“It’s like suddenly recognizing paragraphs, chapters, and individual words in a completely unfamiliar book”

28-Jan-2026 - Researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf have developed a tool that could significantly transform genome research: Helixer identifies genes directly from DNA sequences – without laboratory experiments or prior knowledge about the organism. Before biologists ...

Individual differences in genetic make some therapies ineffective

22-Dec-2025 - The genome differs from person to person in thousands of positions. In some cases, this means that proteins also have a different building block in some places. This can lead to certain antibody-based therapies not working, report researchers at the University of Basel. Whether against cancer, ...

The power of gut enzymes: why a healthy diet works differently for everyone

08-Dec-2025 - Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence "Balance of the Microverse" at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Leibniz-HKI, together with international partners, have decoded a mechanism that determines how our gut microbiome processes healthy plant substances. The "chemical cookbook" ...

Special Software Enhances Accuracy of Genome Annotation for Animals and Plants

"BRAKER3 marks a significant development in bioinformatics and provides academics all over the world access to a high-performance tool for genome annotation"

21-Jun-2024 - The newly developed software BRAKER3 provides scientists all over the world access to a high-performance instrument for genome annotation, i.e. for identifying and labelling several relevant characteristics of a genomic sequence. The software represents a considerable advancement in bioinformatic ...

Breakthrough in protein research: Toolkit makes protein design faster and more accessible

What used to take weeks can now be completed in a day or less

04-Jun-2024 - Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen, the University of Tübingen, and the University Hospital Tübingen have developed a web-based toolkit to accelerate and simplify protein design without needing powerful computers or extensive protein design expertise on the user’s end. ...

How machine learning, data integration and AI contribute to better strategies in the fight against pathogens

Researchers develop a new machine learning approach

15-Jan-2024 - To combat viruses, bacteria and other pathogens, synthetic biology offers new technological approaches whose performance is being validated in experiments. Researchers from the Würzburg Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research and the Helmholtz AI Cooperative applied data integration ...

DNA Chips as Storage Media of the Future

28-Aug-2023 - In the form of DNA, nature shows how data can be stored in a space-saving and long-term manner. Würzburg's chair of bioinformatics is developing DNA chips for computer technology. The hereditary molecule DNA can store a great deal of information over long periods of time in a very small space. ...

AI predicts the work rate of enzymes

“TurNuP outperforms previous models and can even be used successfully for enzymes that have only a low similarity to those in the training dataset”

28-Jul-2023 - Enzymes play a key role in cellular metabolic processes. To enable the quantitative assessment of these processes, researchers need to know the so-called “turnover number” (for short: kcat) of the enzymes. In the scientific journal Nature Communications, a team of bioinformaticians from Heinrich ...

AI predicts the function of enzymes

This method offers a wide range of potential applications

22-May-2023 - Enzymes are the molecule factories in biological cells. However, which basic molecular building blocks they use to assemble target molecules is often unknown and difficult to measure. An international team including bioinformaticians from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has now taken ...