With a grant of just over DKK five million from the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, Professor and DMSc Ulf Simonsen from Aarhus University is immediately beginning a research project with the aim of treating patients with the corona virus and reducing the need for ventilators.

Postdoc Ronja Driller from Poul Nissen’s group is one out of three persons from the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Aarhus University to receive the highly prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. In her reserch, Ronja is investigating the structure and function of human and yeast P5-ATPases. Despite their physiological importance (malfunctions are associated with parkinsonism and language disorders in human), there is very limited knowledge about the actual function and substrates of P5-ATPases. Ronja is benefiting from the recent advances in single-particle Cryo-EM and AU’s iNANO Cryo-EM facility to study these proteins in more detail.

Professor Jørgen Kjems from MBG and iNANO, and Affiliated Researcher at DANDRITE will collaborate with researchers from Health, the University of Copenhagen and the Danish Serum Institute, and with DKK 25 millions from the Carlsberg Foundation they will develop methods for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infections. The goal is at the same time to equip the world to better withstand future viral epidemics.

We are all affected by the current situation, and working from home can be a challenge. For inspiration on how to manage working from home, see the…

The new study, published yesterday in Nature Communications, was led by experts in behavioural genetics and circuit neuroscience in Drosophila at DANDRITE. The researchers’ findings on Drosophila sexual behaviour are important for understanding the complexity of neurocircuitry and behavioural genetics. In this article, first author of the paper PhD-student at DANDRITE Peter Kerwin and Group Leader Anne von Philipsborn explain their new findings.