News & Events

Gorbenko & Sala et al. engineered hyperactive compact CRISPR nucleases by directed evolution in human cells. Cas12f1Super and TnpBSuper show improved editing efficiency without increasing off-target activity, enabling AAV-based genome editing. 

Silva & Mayrhofer et al. show that during chronic metabolic stress Tent5a expression is increased, leading to elongation of poly(A) tails, stabilization of the insulin mRNA, and increasing insulin synthesis. This helps augment insulin secretion during increased metabolic demand.

Zhang et al. analyze single‑cell transcriptomes of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and identify Ki‑67 as a key driver of breast cancer metastasis. Beyond marking proliferation, Ki‑67 promotes CTC intravasation and clustering by enhancing cell–cell adhesion- related  programs.

Iten et al. show here that intestinal worm infection induces the accumulation of activated group 2 innate lymphocytes (ILC2s) in the spleen, which drive the expansion of red pulp macrophages.

Genetic screens facilitate advances in biology, yet functional dissection of large mammalian proteins has remained challenging. A new study in Nature Communications by Corinne Kaufmann from the Wutz group (IMHS) uses targeted point mutagenesis of haploid cells to functionally map regulators at single amino acid resolution. Application of the method reveals critical amino acids of the silencing factor SPEN in X chromosome inactivation.

We demonstrate here that the abundance of polyunsaturated phospholipids (PUFAs) determines the sensitivity of T cells to ferroptosis, with effector T cells that are enriched in PUFAs being highly susceptible, in contrast to memory T cells that are resistant to ferroptosis due to a scarcity of PUFAs. 

Haploid embryonic stem cells are powerful tools but tend to revert to a diploid state, limiting their use. Di Minin et al. show that this instability arises from a metabolic imbalance caused by altered cell size and mitochondrial density, leading to redox dysregulation. Correcting this imbalance stabilizes the haploid genome and links cellular metabolism to chromosome stability.

Eberhart et al. show that systemic peroxisome deficiency results in widespread hypomyelination throughout the central nervous system. This defect is linked to significant metabolic and signaling disruption.

Kobel et al. introduce DisTAL-Seq, a method that enables genome-wide detection of TALEN-induced DNA double strand breaks directly in human cells.

Utilizing large-scale genetic screening and molecular analysis, Aird et al. demonstrated that the proteins SP110 and SP100 interact to regulate the dissolution of PML bodies during mitosis. These findings clarify the mechanisms by which cells mitigate the molecular impact of interferon activation upon viral infection or cancer progression.

Aird & Siegner et al uncovered how cells respond to structurally diverse DNA breaks, identifying ERCC6L2 as a safeguard of staggered DNA double-strand breaks, thereby preventing harmful deletions and chromosomal rearrangements during genome editing.

The paper increases resolution of the multiplexed imaging method imaging mass cytometry (IMC). This is achieved by modified laser acquisition settings and computational deconvolution of oversampled data. High-resolution IMC enables us to analyze subcellular features across multiple biological systems.

The study identifies a poor-prognosis basoluminal tumor cell phenotype in triple-negative breast cancer and proposes a novel patient stratification system based on tumor cytokeratin expression and tumor-immune interactions.

We are welcoming Prof. Kim Bak Jensen, Professor and Executive Node Director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine, reNEW, University of Copenhagen on Thursday, January 29th, 2026, at 9.45 a.m., HPM H33 for a talk entitled: "Guiding intestinal epithelial stem cell fate in health and disease".

Professor Nicola Aceto has been awarded with the 2025 Cloëtta Prize for his groundbreaking contributions to cancer metastasis research.

A recent Cell paper by Saini et al. presents StealTHY, an immunogen-free CRISPR platform, enabling accurate gene discovery and revealing hidden carcinoma metastasis drivers like AMH-AMHR2 in immunocompetent models.

A recent Nature Medicine paper by the Aceto and Ligorio groups suggests that spikes in tumor cell clusters and macrovascular infiltration are key end-of-life events in cancer, providing a rationale for future trials to block large-vessel invasion.

Prof. Dr. Richard Grose, Professor of Cancer Cell Biology at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, will give a seminar on August 29th, 2025, at 12pm, in the seminar room HPL J28. The seminar is entitled "Targeting Ephrin signalling to disrupt stromal-cancer crosstalk in pancreatic cancer". Guests are welcome!

Cangkrama et al. discovered that cancer cells transfer mitochondria to fibroblasts in co-cultures and in mouse tumors, which induces features of pro-tumorigenic cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs). The transfer requires the mitochondrial trafficking protein MIRO2, which is important for CAF differentiation and tumor growth and overexpressed in invasive cancer cells of human tumors. These results identify mitochondrial transfer from cancer cells to fibroblasts as a driver of tumorigenesis.