Second funding period of CRC ChemBioSys
DFG approved Continuation of the CRC1127 ChemBioSys
| by Christine Vogler
The German Research Foundation (DFG) positively re-evaluated the Collaborative Research Centre 1127 and provides 9,5 million Euros for the second funding period. With the second funding period, the DFG acknowledges the importance of this topic and ChemBioSys’s achievements so far.
Since October 2014, the researchers of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology – Hans Knöll Institute (HKI) – and the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology have successfully collaborated in 18 subprojects: The participating colleagues published more than 100 papers since the beginning of the CRC – amongst others, in the prestigious scientific magazine Nature.
The CRC ChemBioSys will continue to investigate chemical mediators that govern the interactions between individual organisms and, as a consequence, the composition of the entire community. Although such mediators affect our daily lives, we know only very little about the role of natural products in stabilizing and shaping the webs of interactions in living communities. Therefore the aim is to elucidate novel chemical mediators and targets that are involved in structuring complex communities, and to understand the regulation and mechanisms that generate community structures and maintain community diversity. On the basis of this understanding, the long-term goal is the directed manipulation of complex biosystems using chemical mediators. The scientists aim at discovering interaction patterns in multilateral interactions at the chemical, biochemical and community levels.
With 9,5 million Euros in total, the CRC expands now to include also a project by the University of Potsdam in the second funding period. ChemBioSys consists of 18 research projects led by 23 scientists. Almost 30 doctoral and postdoctoral positions were created in Jena. The chemists, biologists, microbiologists and bioinformaticians of our network can now continue to unravel the role of chemical mediators in complex biosystems.