News Overview

The Eu­ro­pean Re­search Council awards Prof Anna Marciniak-Czochra (IAM/BioQuant/IWR) and Jun-Prof Simon Anders (Bioquant/ZMBH) together with Dr Laure Bally-Cuif (Institut Pasteur, Paris) and Ana Martin-Villalba (DKFZ) the highly endowed ERC Synergy grant for a pioneering re­search project that focuses on interdisciplinary re­search into the dynamics and control of neural stem cells. Stem cells are human cells with the unique ability to develop various other types of cells with specialized functions. The project “PerPetuating Stemness: From single-cell analysis to mechanistic spatio-temporal models of neural stem cell dynamics” (PEPS) is going to investigate the ability of stem cells to renew themselves and to differentiate. The PEPS team will develop and combine experimental methods with data analysis and mathematical modelling in order to understand how neural stem cells guarantee the human brain's long-term function by constantly generating new neurons necessary for its plasticity and repair. This requires an interdisciplinary and multi-scale effort to clarify how to reconcile decisions taken at the single cell level and at the population level. The ERC is making available approximately eleven million euros for the PEPS project, with almost 3.8 million going to fund the work at Ruperto Carola. The ERC Synergy Grants fund collaborative projects that, due to their complexity, require methods and expertise of multiple groups in order to achieve breakthroughs that would not be possible in individual projects.

Further information:
Anna Marciniak-Czochra's Website
Simon Anders' Website
Press Release by the Eu­ro­pean Re­search Council