In 2025, early-career researchers at the FMI secured highly competitive fellowships and grants, including postdoctoral fellowships from the European Molecular Biology Organization and the Human Frontier Science Program. These awards are internationally recognized for supporting outstanding research.

Elena Testoni, a PhD candidate in the Giorgetti lab, studies how enhancers and promoters - DNA elements that control when and how genes are activated - regulate gene expression. Alongside her research, she helps lead projects aimed at reducing the institute's energy use, minimizing waste, and promoting environmentally responsible lab practices. In this Q&A, Elena shares her passion for understanding how the genome is regulated and her efforts to make scientific research more sustainable.

Scientists at the FMI and the University of California-Santa Cruz have found that similar molecular machineries control daily circadian rhythms and developmental timing. Their work in worms shows that core timing systems can be repurposed through evolution to coordinate both daily cycles and the precise schedule of growth.

FMI group leader Prof. Georg Keller and Prof. Philip Sterzer from Universitären Psychiatrischen Kliniken (UPK) Basel have jointly been awarded a Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF) grant over 1.5 million CHF to investigate the brain circuit changes that underlie schizophrenia. Keller and Sterzer's project aims to bridge a gap between fundamental neuroscience and clinical research - by linking discoveries from mouse models to brain activity patterns in humans.

In May 2025, Lucas Morales - a former postdoc and now a research associate in computational biology with Helge Grosshans - represented the FMI in Brno at the EU-LIFE Science Vision Talk Contest, a science communication competition inspired by the Eurovision Song Contest.

Mouse geneticist Antoine Peters and his team investigate how information beyond the DNA sequence - shaped by chemical marks on the DNA molecule - controls the earliest steps of life. By revealing how errors in these mechanisms can silence essential genes and prevent embryos from implanting, this work may shed light on the molecular causes of infertility.

In this first-person account, FMI's senior communications manager describes taking part in an early human trial that adapts previous experiments in mice to explore how the human brain responds when visual and auditory information suddenly fall out of sync.

Three researchers from Friedrich Miescher Institute - Nanci Winke, Arnau Ramos Prats, and Lukas Anneser - have been awarded a prestigious Ambizione Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Their work spans from uncovering how emotions guide behavior, to understanding how the brain responds to anxiety treatments, to exploring how brain states influence learning and memory.

Scientists from Friedrich Miescher Institute discovered that thousands of genes in the worm C. elegans switch on and off in precise, rhythmic patterns during development, coordinated across tissues by chromatin - the DNA-protein complex in the nucleus. Their model predicts these rhythms, showing that chromatin timing drives gene activity and offering insights into human biological clocks.

Researchers from Friedrich Miescher Institute have uncovered how the freshwater polyp Hydra decides whether a cell becomes part of its stinging tentacles or its anchoring foot, shedding light on some of the fundamental rules of body patterning - or how cells organize into distinct tissues.