MIMS researchers met members of the VU LSC EMBL node

On 6th April, 2022, members of MIMS participated at an online meeting with the director and group leaders of the Vilnius University Life Sciences Center (VU LSC)-EMBL Partnership for Genome Editing Technologies. The aim of the meeting was to strengthen the connection between the MIMS, the Swedish node within the Nordic EMBL Partnership, and VU LSC, EMBL node since 2020, and identify initial matching points for future collaborations. 

Picture: A screenshot showing some of the participants and the starting slide of the presentation given by Lina Malinauskaité, group leader at VU LSC. Credit: Nóra Lehotai.

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Birgitta Henriques Normark new President of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Birgitta Henriques Normark, Professor and Head Physician at Karolinksa Institutet, member of the MIMS Executive Board, has been elected as the new President of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Kungliga vetenskapsakademien). She takes over this role from the current President, Professor Dan Larhammar, on July 1st.

Picture: Birgitta Henriques Normark. Credit: Stefan Zimmerman

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Increased risk of blood clots persists long after COVID-19

Text after the original press release written by Ola Nilsson.

Even several months after COVID-19, one is still at an increased risk of blood clot and bleeding. In the worst case, a blood clot can be fatal however, it can often be treated or prevented. These are the findings of a study from Umeå University, Sweden, where researchers analyzed all COVID-19 cases in Sweden from the start of the pandemic until May last year.
Picture: Dr Anne-Marie Fors Connolly, the head of the study (left) and Ioannis Katsoularis, one of the first authors of this study (right). Credits: Hans Karlsson and Klas Sjöberg.

Anne-Marie Fors Connolly, MIMS Clinical Research Fellow, researcher at the Department of Clinical Microbiology at Umeå University, who also works as a clinician at Norrland’s University Hospital, lead the recent study about the risk of blood clots and bleeding following COVID-19, which is now published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

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MIMS Spotlight Series: Meet Kai Ehrenbolger

Written by Nóra Lehotai and Kai Ehrenbolger.

Kai joined MIMS in August 2019 to start his PhD career in the lab of Jonas Barandun, who was a freshly recruited MIMS group leader that time. Kai moved to Umeå from Basel, Switzerland, to improve his cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) skills and to have an adventure abroad.

Picture: Kai Ehrenbolger in front of the new Glacios microscope at UCEM. Credit: Himanshu Sharma.

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Research Portrait: The Cava lab studies the “Achilles’ heel” of bacteria, the cell wall

Written by Nóra Lehotai and Felipe Cava. The text part for "New intracellular environment specific mechanism of immune evasion of Salmonella discovered" is based on and modified after the original press release by CNB-CSIC Communication. Translation by Nóra Lehotai.

Felipe Cava, MIMS Senior Principal Investigator and Associate Professor at the Department of Molecular Biology at Umeå University, wants to understand the diversity of cell wall biology across species and how this knowledge can be used to fight emerging infectious diseases. His team is using cutting-edge methodology to understand the role of the cell wall in environmental adaptation and for finding potential targets for antimicrobial therapies. The Cava lab and their collaborators recently published two scientific articles in which they revealed groundbreaking discoveries about how the bacterial cell wall adapts to different conditions. The researchers involved in these studies have been able to, for the first time, analyze peptidoglycan, the main cell wall component, in deep details.

Read more: Research Portrait: The Cava lab studies the “Achilles’ heel” of bacteria, the cell wall