New potential target proteins for novel antibiotics discovered

Press release – 30 November, 2022, Umeå, Sweden

New potential target proteins for novel antibiotics discovered

Bacteria are small but tough organisms, partly because their cells are enclosed by a protective cell wall skeleton. Professor Felipe Cava and his team at Umeå University in Sweden and collaborators at Harvard Medical School in the USA, have discovered long-sought proteins needed to maintain the bacterial cell wall structure. These proteins represent a very promising vulnerability for many bacteria that can be exploited by future antimicrobial compounds. The findings are published in Nature.

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André Mateus, MIMS Team Leader, receives ERC Starting Grant

Text by Nóra Lehotai.

Two researchers from Umeå University, André Nyberg (Department of Community Medicine and Rehabilitation) and André Mateus (Department of Chemistry), receive the prestigious ERC Starting Grant for emerging excellent scientists. Congratulations to André, new ERC laureate! 

Read more: André Mateus, MIMS Team Leader, receives ERC Starting Grant

MIMS Symposium 2022: a platform for showcasing collaboration in basic, translational and clinical research

Written by Gretchen Repasky (Nordic EMBL Partnership) and Nóra Lehotai (MIMS)

MIMS welcomed its Executive Board and research community to the MIMS Symposium to share significant advances in research and its growing Baltic collaborations

On November 11, 2022, the MIMS Symposium highlighted MIMS research and Baltic collaborations for the local scientific community and the visiting MIMS Executive Board.

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Open position: Postdoctor in machine learning for single-cell data analysis

Johan Henriksson, group leader at MIMS and the Dept. of Molecular Biology, in close collaboration with Tommy Löfstedt, group leader at the Dept. of Computing Science, are looking for a postdoc.

Project description

Gene isoforms play key roles in disease etiology and outcome. Despite that gene isoforms are involved in most biological processes, they are commonly ignored because we lack tools to understand them. In this project we will build new large-scale machine learning tools to extract gene isoform information from commonly existing single-cell RNA-seq data.

The approach we consider is based on variational autoencoders and sequence models. The challenges lie in the data being extremely large, sparse, and noisy. The project will open doors into the currently most rapidly expanding field in biology.

Application deadline: 1 December 2022

Read more: Open position: Postdoctor in machine learning for single-cell data analysis

How cryo-EM revealed the secrets of enterovirus replication

Written by Nóra Lehotai, Lars-Anders Carlson and Selma Dahmane

How a virus hijacks a host cell to make new virus particles is a key question in the prevention and treatment of virus-caused diseases. Dr Selma Dahmane and Associate Professor Lars-Anders Carlson at Umeå University are the first and last authors of a freshly published paper in Nature Communications that sheds new light on this process. They show how new poliovirus particles are formed inside the infected cell thanks to the latest advancements in cryo-electron tomography. Poliovirus belongs to the group of enteroviruses, a big group of RNA viruses that also includes for example the common cold-causing rhinoviruses, or enterovirus D68 that can cause severe respiratory disease and paralysis in children. Polio itself has caused disease and death in humans for millennia, and the poliovirus was not long ago hoped to be eradicated. But the recent detection of poliovirus in London sewage, and a case of poliomyelitis in New York, has highlighted the difficulty in eliminating poliovirus even in developed countries.

Read more: How cryo-EM revealed the secrets of enterovirus replication