Discovery of the first fractal molecule in nature

‘We stumbled on this structure completely by accident and almost couldn’t believe what we saw when we first took images of it using an electron microscope’

12-Apr-2024 - Snowflakes, fern leaves, romanesco cauliflower heads: many structures in nature have a certain regularity. Their individual parts resemble the shape of the whole structure. Such shapes, which repeat from the largest to the smallest, are called fractals. But regular fractals that match almost ...

A new path to active ingredient diversity

26-Mar-2024 - Many important drugs, such as antibiotics and cancer drugs, are derived from natural substances from bacteria. The bacterial enzymes that produce these active ingredients are considered ideal tools for synthetic biology due to their modular design. By researching protein evolution, a team led by ...

Powering Nitrogenases: New ways for sustainable fertiliser production

New targets for improving biocatalysts

26-Feb-2024 - Nitrogenases are considered promising candidates for the sustainable enzymatic production of ammonia and carbon compounds. One bottleneck in this complex process, the supply of electrons to the enzymes, has remained a mystery until now. Now a team at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial ...

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 ...

Tobias Erb receives the Leibniz Award 2024

Innovative, interdisciplinary research approach opens up new possibilities for developing technologies to address the global climate crisis

11-Dec-2023 - Prof. Dr. Tobias Erb, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology and Professor at the University of Marburg, has been awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The Leibniz Prize is the most important research award in Germany and ...

The enzyme with the iron heart

Results could lead to new biocatalysts for sustainable biotechnology

11-Dec-2023 - Nitrogenases are the only enzymes capable of reducing atmospheric nitrogen to bioavailable nitrogen (ammonia), a process essential for all life on Earth. Using cryogenic electron microscopy, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, have now solved ...

Cell-free quest for new antibiotics

A new method combines synthetic biology with artificial intelligence

20-Nov-2023 - The rising resistance of bacteria to antibiotics presents an escalating global health risk. Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology have combined synthetic biology and artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a more efficient approach to finding and creating new ...

A new order for brewer`s yeast

An artificial chromosome combines all t-RNA genes for cellular protein production: milestone in the international synthetic yeast genome project

14-Nov-2023 - For years, researchers have been working to synthetically recreate the genome, or more precisely, the chromosomes of brewer's yeast. Now it has been possible to combine all transfer RNA genes in an artificial chromosome. The result sets a milestone in the development of the first synthetic ...

Small protein, big impact

A small protein acts as a sensitive alarm for bacteria to be alert to antimicrobial peptides

16-Oct-2023 - Nature uses antimicrobial peptides as broad-spectrum antibiotics: They form the first line of defense against invading pathogens. Bacteria, in turn, have developed ways to circumvent these defenses. Microbiologists at the Max Planck Institute in Marburg have investigated how a small protein ...

Viruses glue RNA to proteins

21-Aug-2023 - Until now, RNA and proteins were thought to interact only briefly during cellular processes. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, have discovered that this is not the case. During their developmental cycle, bacterial viruses `glue` specific ...