Two ERC Starting Grants for UoC researchers

The UoC researchers Marcel Schubert, Junior Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, and Matthias Heinz, Professor at the Faculty of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences, have been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Excellent early-career researchers are funded with the Starting Grant for a period of five years with up to 1.5 million euros. Marcel Schubert , Junior Professor for Biointegrated Photonics at the University of Cologne's Humboldt Centre for Nanoand Biophotonics, will receive funding to conduct research on the mechanisms of genetic adaptation within living cells in the project 'HYPERION - Optical Sequencing inside Live Cells with Biointegrated Nanolasers'. Almost 20 years after the first genome was completely decoded, there are already over one million more in databases worldwide. One of the most important insights resulting from these enormous amounts of data is the enormous complexity and diversity of the molecular processes that control the constant adaptation of living organisms to their environment. Understanding the relationships between the genome and the resulting properties of cells is one of the fundamental questions in modern developmental biology, and the basis in biomedicine for research into a wide range of diseases. Many mechanisms of genetic adaptation are still unknown.