http://ist.ac.at/ Latest news from IST Austria en http://ist.ac.at/fileadmin/images/feedicon.png http://ist.ac.at/ 30 30 Latest news from IST Austria TYPO3 - get.content.right http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Wed, 15 May 2013 08:31:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/austrian-academy-of-sciences-accepts-christoph-lampert-and-michael-sixt-into-junge-kurie/ The Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) has elected Christoph Lampert and Michael Sixt of IST...

High-resolution photo of Christoph Lampert

High-resolution photo of Michael Sixt

]]> Wed, 15 May 2013 08:29:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/ist-lecture-stephen-smale-the-protein-folding-problem-via-relations-with-patterns-in-data-and-th/ Yesterday, on May 24, IST Austria had the great pleasure to welcome Stephen Smale for his IST... Yesterday, on May 24, IST Austria had the great pleasure to welcome Stephen Smale for his IST Lecture on “The protein folding problem via relations with patterns in data and the geometry of kernels”. Smale is an American mathematician, famous for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture for all dimensions greater than or equal to 5. Smale received the Fields Medal in 1966, and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2007. Since 2009, he is Distinguished University Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. In his lecture, Stephen Smale showed how mathematical methods can be used to describe the protein folding problem. According to Christian Anfinsen, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1972, the amino acid chain defines the protein folding. Anfinsen’s dogma was the starting point for Smale’s basic considerations on how, by folding the protein back and forth, the linear amino acid chain can be turned into a folding sequence. Smale expressed his confidence that once the protein folding is better understood, researchers will know more about how it influences biological processes. That will have an enormous impact, for example, on the development of vaccines. Stephen Smale’s lecture in IST Austria’s Raiffeisen Lecture Hall was a great success, drawing more than 130 visitors. His talk was followed by a lively discussion with the enthusiastic audience.]]> Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:02:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/rising-rice-roots/ IST Austria scientists contribute to analytic tool for the growth of rice roots A team of scientists including Herbert Edelsbrunner, Professor at IST Austria, and his postdoc Olga Symonova, have identified genes that control the architecture of root systems in rice. In their paper, published in the March 11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1304354110), they describe a new method, for which Herbert Edelsbrunner and Olga Symonova contributed new analytic tools. The genetic factors influencing root growth are little understood as the complex shape of roots, the opacity of soil and environmental influences confound root analysis. With their 3D root imagining and analysis, the researchers were able to identify regions of the rice genome that are in control of different aspects of root growth.  This new platform may lead to the identification of genes with the potential to alter root traits, which may also improve the efficiency of root systems resulting in better crop yields, a reduction in required chemical inputs and the ability to grow in harsh environments.  Photo © by club research/APA-Fotoservice/Pauty Previous publication by Herbert Edelsbrunner for download:

• On rice root growth
• On reconstruction of 3D plant root shape

]]> Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:53:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/new-role-for-salicylic-acid/ In a new paper published in PNAS on Tuesday, April 23, a team of researchers around Jiři Friml,... In a new paper published in PNAS on Tuesday, April 23, a team of researchers around Jiři Friml, now Professor at IST Austria, reports an unanticipated effect of the plant hormone salicylic acid on protein trafficking in plant cells. Their research, performed while Jiři Friml was still based at VIB Ghent, suggests that salicylic acid affects the removal of cargos from the cell surface through endocytosis, mediated by the coat protein clathrin. This is likely a novel independent mechanism by which salicylic acid regulates aspects of plant physiology. The research group of Jiři Friml recently moved to IST Austria. Information for download: Link to research article in PNAS]]> News Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:46:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/the-young-scientist-symposium-2013-takes-shape/ Group of junior researchers at IST Austria announces the Young Scientist Symposium 2013 on... The concept of shape and how to deal with it touches on many areas of research, including mathematics, computer science and life science. PhD students and postdocs at  the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) are currently preparing completely independently the Young Scientist Symposium (YSS) on April 26, 2013. Titled “Understanding Shape: in silico and in vivo”. The symposium will present a selection of international speakers discussing various approaches. Problems of shape and form are of relevance in silico (e.g. in computer models) and in vivo (the living object). This multitude of aspects has led to a number of different approaches, often developed in isolation to each other. Accordingly, the one-day symposium will be dedicated to bringing together alternative views. Description, formation, and perception of shape will be covered in talks by six experts from internationally renowned research institutes. The presentations will be followed by a panel discussion. One of the speakers, Ed Connor, professor at the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, summarizes the objective if the symposium: “Shape is a truly ubiquitous domain, posing identical problems of parameterization and analysis across dozens of disciplines. This conference comprises shape research across disciplines that rarely communicate but must have a great deal to say to each other.” Fostering the communication between different fields of research is one of the main goals of the YSS 2013, and reflects the spirit of research at IST Austria. Massimo Ferri, professor at the Engineering Faculty of Bologna University and speaker at the YSS 2013, describes the advantages of the interaction of disciplines in his own field of research: “We come from a period in which most mathematics was self-referential and closed in itself, but the new century seems to give a high value to interdisciplinarity.” This interdisciplinarity is reflected by the selection of speakers who all work in different fields. The exchange of ideas will be promoted by a panel discussion open for the interaction between speakers as well as contributions from the audience. The organizing committee of the YSS 2013 is as international and multidisciplinary as the speakers are. The four students and four postdocs came from six different countries to do their research at IST Austria. Abraham Martin del Campo (Mexico) heads the organizing committee: “It is a valuable experience to interact with leading scientists in the field as well as fellow postdocs and students, and organize such an inspiring event“. Last year, a committee of students and postocs at IST Austria organized the first YSS on human evolution. The symposium attracted around 100 participants. Tom Ellis (PhD student), involved in the organization of both events: „Last year’s success encouraged us to make the symposium an established annual event. Each year we would like to explore a new topic, which would reflect the engaged and interdiscpilinary atmosphere at IST Austria.“ For more information and registration, visit the symposium’s website. Information for download

• Press announcement
• Photo of organizing committee
• High-resolution symposium poster

]]> Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:00:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/ist-austria-assistant-professor-named-as-hfsp-grantee/ Tobias Bollenbach is partner of a Program Grant in joint project with Måns Ehrenberg, Johan... Tobias Bollenbach, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) since 2010, has been awarded a Program Grant of the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP). This grant supports new collaborations among teams of scientists working in different countries. Together with three international partners the biological physicist will work on “Revealing the fundamental limits of cell growth” as the according project application is entitled. The combined budget for Måns Ehrenberg (Uppsala University, Sweden), Johan Paulsson (Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA), Erdal Toprak (Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey) and Tobias Bollenbach amounts to a total of US $ 450.000 per year. The total duration of the program grant is three years. The Human Frontier Science Program funds frontier research in the life sciences. The highly competitive grants are regarded as very prestigious in this field. This year, 10 Young Investigator Grants and 23 Program Grants were selected from a total of over 700 original letters of intent and 94 subsequently invited full applications. Tobias Bollenbach, a German born in 1978, studied physics at the University of Göttingen and performed his master's studies in nuclear astrophysics at Michigan State University. Bollenbach then switched fields to biological physics. In his PhD work he developed theoretical approaches to describe the transport of morphogens in tissues. As a post-doctoral fellow he performed experimental and theoretical studies on microbial gene regulation in response to drugs. In 2010 Tobias Bollenbach joined IST Austria as Assistant Professor. Bollenbach and his group research how cells, ranging from those in the tissues of multi-cellular organisms to single-celled microbes, respond to signals in the environment by modifying the expression of their genes. The long-term goal is to gain a deeper, more quantitative understanding of the relation between the signals present in the cell’s environment and the information processing and other events which they trigger inside cells. The President of IST Austria Thomas Henzinger congratulated Bollenbach on his success: "This is excellent news and a confirmation for Tobias’s work and IST Austria’s attraction for promising young scientists. This can be deduced from the list of HFSP grantees so far at IST Austria. Michael Sixt and Gašper Tkačik were awarded with Program Grants, Harald Janovjak and Călin Guet with Young Investigator Grants." Information for download

• High-resolution photo of Tobias Bollenbach

]]> Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:06:00 +0200 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/yes-madm/ IST Austria Professor Simon Hippenmeyer with collaborators succeeds in extending MADM method • ... According to Gregor Mendel, we can thank our mother and father equally for the way we turn out, as their genes contribute to our genetic make-up in an equal manner. This is, however, not so for a specific set of genes which display “genomic imprinting”. Imprinted genes are active when they are inherited from one parent, but inactive when inherited from the other parent. Thus, some of these imprinted genes are expressed only when they are on a chromosome inherited from the mother (maternal), but not when the chromosome is inherited from the father (paternal), while for other imprinted genes it is the other way around. Scientists have been debating how many genes of the total human genome are imprinted, with the estimates ranging from about a hundred to over a thousand. Also, the precise function of imprinting is still unclear: It is certainly crucial for prenatal development, metabolism and behavior, and its deregulation causes many diseases including cancer and brain disorders. However, the role of most imprinted genes is so far not thoroughly studied. In their recent publication in Cell Reports (10.1016/j.celrep.2013.02.002), Simon Hippenmeyer – Assistant Professor at IST Austria – and his colleagues Randy Johnson at MD Anderson Cancer Center and Liqun Luo at Stanford University extended the ‘Mosaic Analysis with Double Markers’ (MADM) technique in mice to probe for the effects of imprinting at the level of single cells. Hippenmeyer and his colleagues were, for the first time, able to analyze the effects of imprinting on single cells. Their work using the MADM technique demonstrates that imprinting has specific effects, dependent on cell type and chromosome. For MADM, two reciprocally chimeric marker genes are placed separately on identical positions on homologous chromosomes. The chimeric marker genes consist of partial coding sequences for green and red fluorescent proteins. If MADM is activated during cell division, the two daughter cells can, under certain conditions, each express one of the two fluorescent proteins, and so glow in different colors. This enables researchers to easily spot and analyze these cells. In their recent work, Hippenmeyer and colleagues used MADM to create so called uniparental disomy (UPD) for sets of whole chromosomes. In maternal UPD, cells carry two copies of a particular chromosome from the mother but lack the father’s chromosome. In paternal UPD, cells inherit two chromosomes from the father but have no chromosome from the mother. With the use of the MADM technique, cells with maternal UPD can be labeled in one color (e.g. red) and cells with paternal UPD with the other color (e.g. green). For imprinted genes, either the mother’s or the father’s copy is consistently active, while the other is inactive. Therefore, cells with UPDs carry either two active or two inactive copies of an imprinted gene. By comparing the phenotype of certain maternal UPD cells to paternal UPD cells, the researchers could then probe whether imprinted genes on a particular chromosome have any effect. Hippenmeyer and colleagues focused their analysis on UPDs for mouse chromosomes 7 and 12, and assessed the number and shape of cells with maternal UPD or paternal UPD, respectively. They obtained two key results: firstly, the effects of imprinted genes are highly specific, depending on the type of cell. Secondly, UPDs for distinct chromosomes lead to different effects on cells. The scientists observed the most extreme changes with chromosome 7. Cells carrying two paternal copies of chromosome 7 are much more numerous than cells carrying two maternal copies. They are particularly numerous in the liver and lung, while no change is seen in the heart and for certain types of nerve cells in the brain. The changes are therefore specific to the cell type. Conversely, when looking at cells carrying two paternal copies of chromosome 12, the number of cells does not appear to be changed in any tissue. This suggests that an imbalance of imprinted gene expression on chromosome 7 has a different effect from an imbalance on chromosome 12. With this further development of the MADM technique, Hippenmeyer and his colleagues will lay the groundwork to systematically analyze the effect of imprinting on a whole genome level. The researchers are now in progress to apply the MADM method to rigorously assay the effect of imprinting on the brain and its role in the development of neural circuits. Information for download

• Simon Hippenmeyer in video abstract
  

]]> Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:00:00 +0100 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/mapping-blank-spots-in-the-cheeseboard-maze/ IST Austria Professor Jozsef Csicsvari together with collaborators succeeds in uncovering processes... During learning, novel information is transformed into memory through the processing and encoding of information in neural circuits. In a recent publication in Neuron, IST Austria Professor Jozsef Csicsvari, together with his collaborator David Dupret at the University of Oxford, and Joseph O’Neill, postdoc in Csicsvari’s group, uncovered a novel role for inhibitory interneurons in the rat hippocampus during the formation of spatial memory. During spatial learning, space is represented in the hippocampus through plastic changes in the connections between neurons. Jozsef Csicsvari and his collaborators investigate spatial learning in rats using the cheeseboard maze apparatus. This apparatus contains many holes, some of which are selected to hide food in order to test spatial memory. During learning trials, animals learn where the rewards are located, and after a period sleep, the researchers test whether the animal can recall these reward locations. In previous work, they and others have shown that memory of space is encoded in the hippocampus through changes in the firing of excitatory pyramidal cells, the so-called “place cells”. A place cell fires when the animal arrives at a particular location. Normally, place cells always fire at the same place in an environment; however, during spatial learning the place of their firing can change to encode where the reward is found, forming memory maps. In their new publication, the researchers investigated the timescale of map formation, showing that during spatial learning, pyramidal neuron maps representing previous and new reward locations “flicker”, with both firing patterns occurring. At first, old maps and new maps fluctuate, as the animal is unsure whether the location change is transient or long-lasting. At a later stage, the new map and so the relevant new information dominates. The scientists also investigated the contribution of inhibitory interneuron circuits to learning. They show that these interneurons, which are extensively interconnected with pyramidal cells, change their firing rates during map formation and flickering: some interneurons fire more often when the new pyramidal map fires, while others fire less often with the new map. These changes in interneuron firing were only observed during learning, not during sleep or recall. The scientists also show that the changes in firing rate are due to map-specific changes in the connections between pyramidal cells and interneurons. When a pyramidal cell is part of a new map, the strengthening of a connection with an interneuron causes an increase in the firing of this interneuron. Conversely, when a pyramidal cell is not part of a new map, the weakening of the connection with the interneuron causes a decrease in interneuron firing rate. Both, the increase and the decrease in firing rate can be beneficial for learning, allowing the regulation of plasticity between pyramidal cells and controlling the timing in their firing. The new research therefore shows that not only excitatory neurons modify their behaviour and exhibit plastic connection changes during learning, but also the inhibitory interneuron circuits. The researchers suggest that inhibitory interneurons could be involved in map selection – helping one map dominate and take over during learning, so that the relevant information is encoded. Information for download

• Image of rat on a cheeseboard maze. Neuronal traces show action potentials for some recorded cells at the reward locations. LED traces taken by long exposure show the movement of the animal across the maze.
  

]]> Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:49:00 +0100 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/german-ambassador-visits-ist-austria/ The German ambassador to Austria, Detlev Rünger, together with the counsellor for economic... The German ambassador to Austria, Detlev Rünger, together with the counsellor for economic affairs, Wolfgang Wendl, today visited IST Austria. President Thomas Henzinger informed them about the status and the perspectives of the institute. This was followed by a meeting with German students and postdocs: Martin Behrndt, Karin Mitosch, Eva Kiermaier and Stefan Jeschke explained why they had decided to move to IST Austria. Finally, IST Austria professor Michael Sixt (left) gave Rünger (centre of picture) and Wendl (right) a tour of his lab and discussed future research fields.]]> Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:11:00 +0100 http://ist.ac.at/nc/news-media/news/news-detail/article/ist-austria-congratulates-zeilinger-on-oeaw-presidency/ IST Austria President Thomas Henzinger thanks Zeilinger as one of the founding fathers of IST... Other News Sat, 16 Mar 2013 09:15:00 +0100