Monday, 09 April, 2018

Prestigious award for CeNS scientist Ralf Jungmann

HSFP Grant

 

Ralf Jungmann, Professor of Experimental Physics at LMU, has received a highly endowed Young Investigators’ Grant from the Human Frontier Science Program for 3-year collaborative research projects with international colleagues. His collaborators are Professor Maartje Bastings, who heads the Programmable Biomaterials Lab at the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and Dr. Ian Parish, who works in the Cancer Immunology Program at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia. Their project, entitled “Detecting inequity in dendritic cells through bio-inspired synthetic T cells”, is designed to elucidate the basic mechanisms that enable the immune system to distinguish between self and non-self. More specifically, Jungmann and colleagues want to know how antigen-presenting dendritic cells activate T cells to recognize and attack cells expressing non-self proteins, while rendering them tolerant to self antigens. To answer this question, they must work out what the dendritic cell actually presents, i.e. define the precise nature of the interaction between single dendritic cells and their T-cell partners. Super-resolution fluorescence microscopy techniques now provide a means of doing so. Jungmann, who also leads a research group in Molecular Imaging and Bionanotechnology at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, has developed hybridization-dependent techniques for multiplexed fluorescence imaging of specific proteins in single cells, based on the use of complementary DNA tags and nanostructures generated by DNA origami. The project team plans to construct synthetic T cells that will make it possible to utilize these DNA-based tools to characterize and identify the signal molecules involved in the interaction of T cells with dendritic cells.

The Human Frontier Science Program promotes international research collaborations in the biosciences, and projects must involve researchers from at least two countries.

LMU Press release...