Formic acid in focus

An artificial key enzyme opens up the conversion of CO2 via formic acid to raw materials

18-Dec-2025 - Formate, the salt of formic acid, is seen as an important future pivot for sustainable biotechnologies. A team at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology has developed an enzyme that efficiently converts formate to formaldehyde. This is crucial for the sustainable conversion of CO2 ...

Bacteria Borrow Viruses to Spread Their Own Defences

Pseudomonas fluorescens exposed to sterile compost filtrate acquired multiple mobile genetic elements carrying anti-phage defence genes

07-Nov-2025 - A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology has discovered a new class of bacterial mobile genetic elements that use giant viruses—known as jumbo phages—to move between cells. The work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), uncovers an unexpected ...

First step towards synthetic CO2 fixation in living cells

Three modules forming a new-to-nature CO2 fixation cycle successfully implemented in E.coli

29-Dec-2023 - Synthetic biology offers the opportunity to build biochemical pathways for the capture and conversion of carbon dioxide (CO2). Researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology have developed a synthetic biochemical cycle that directly converts CO2 into the central building ...

Electricity driving life

Using a metabolic pathway, energy-rich resources can be produced via the power of electricity

18-Aug-2023 - When nature performs chemical reactions to create energy-rich compounds from simple molecules, it requires energy. So far, it has not been possible to use human-made electricity to drive these biochemical processes. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg ...

Light drives injection

By coupling a bacterial injection system with a light-controlled molecular switch, scientists are able to inject proteins into eukaryontic cells

15-May-2020 - When bacteria such as Salmonella or Yersinia cause fever, diarrhoea or abdominal pain, tiny "injection needles" are at work: their type 3 secretion system, or T3SS for short, shoots bacterial virulence proteins directly into the eukaryotic host cells. Researchers have thought of using bacterial ...

Biological machine produces its own building blocks

Researchers have for the first time developed a genome the size of a minimal cell that can copy itself

18-Feb-2020 - The field of synthetic biology does not only observe and describe processes of life but also mimics them. A key characteristic of life is the ability to ability for replication, which means the maintenance of a chemical system. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried ...

Otto Hahn Medal for Jaime Agudo-Canalejo

22-Jun-2017 - Im Rahmen der 68. Jahreshauptversammlung der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG), die am 21. und 22. Juni in Weimar, Jena und Erfurt stattfindet, erhält der Nachwuchswissenschaftler vom Max-Planck-Institut für Kolloid- und Grenzflächenforschung die Otto-Hahn-Medaille. Er wird für seine herausragende ...

Synapses always on the starting blocks

Vesicles filled with neurotransmitters touch the cell membrane, thereby enabling their rapid-fire release

29-Oct-2014 - While neurons rapidly propagate information in their interior via electrical signals, they communicate with each other at special contact points known as the synapses. Chemical messenger substances, the neurotransmitters, are stored in vesicles at the synapses. When a synapse becomes active, some ...

New probes for the brain

The Department of Microsystems Engineering of the University of Freiburg is Coordinating the Research Project NeuroSeeker

12-Feb-2013 - Developing tiny probes for research and brain-related medical applications – that is the goal of the project NeuroSeeker, launched in February 2013 with a kick-off event in Leuven. The interdisciplinary project pools the expertise of ten partner institutions from Europe and Canada. The University ...

Making and breaking heterochromatin

Scientists discover 2 further mechanisms necessary for the formation of heterochromatin

28-Sep-2012 - To fit the two-meter long DNA molecule into a cell nucleus that is only a few thousandths of a millimetre in size, long sections of the DNA must be strongly compacted. Epigenetic marks maintain these sections, known as heterochromatin. Scientists of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and ...