FMI incubator lab: Translating fundamental discoveries to potential application

At the beginning of March, the FMI opened an incubator lab to further support the translation of fundamental discoveries to potential application. Currently, two former FMI PhD students, who are in close contact with the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, develop an idea for biomedical translation based on their research results on DNA repair. On Thursday, they are hosting a mini-symposium with external experts A discovery published in 2017 is the starting point for a proof of concept study pursued at the FMI by two former PhD students, Michael Hauer and Andrew Seeber. In this publication, the young scientists identified a novel important process that helps safeguard DNA integrity. They found that a fraction of histones was degraded upon DNA damage, and amassed evidence that this would facilitate the repair by homology-driven recombination, at least in budding yeast. Histones built up the spools around which DNA is wound and organized into chromatin, sometimes tighter, sometimes less tight. They define how accessible DNA is for the many proteins that interact with DNA, including the repair machinery.