A pioneering collaboration investigating the intricacies of biological clocks in bacteria has been awarded prestigious European Research Council (ERC) funding.
The John Innes Centre, LMU Munich and Leiden University have won through intense competition to secure an ERC Synergy Grant to take forward their ground-breaking research. The collaboration is one of 57 research groups, from 184 universities and research centres across 24 countries, receiving a total of €571m. Just over 10 per cent of the 548 submitted proposals were successful.
The award, worth €8.3m over six years, will help the research groups of Professor Antony Dodd, Professor Martha Merrow and Professor Ákos T. Kovács and to establish closer ties as they build on recent fundamental discoveries in an emerging field.
The project, called MicroClock, follows the recent discoveries by this collaboration of biological or circadian rhythms in the non-photosynthetic soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis.
The knowledge that this bacterium has internal clocks, which synchronises its activities to daily cycles, opens exciting research horizons in the field of "chronomicrobiology". Potential applications from this project lie in human health, biotechnology, and climate-smart farming.
Professor Antony Dodd, a group leader at the John Innes Centre said: "The implications of this research will be fascinating and far-reaching: bacteria make up 12 percent of life on earth, they cause devastating human diseases, they are vital to soil health and crop protection, and they are central to biotechnology."
Professor Dodd added: "Our discoveries show the benefits of trans European scientific collaboration; we would not have been able to achieve what we have so far without this kind of approach. Now with this funding we can use Bacillus as a model to understand the properties, principles, and ecology of circadian clocks across a new kingdom of life."
This is the first ERC Synergy grant to be awarded in the field of chronobiology, the study of biological rhythms in living organisms.
Professor Ákos T. Kovács of Leiden University said: "Throughout my entire career, I have been making progress by describing processes but here we are discovering entirely new phenomena. This ERC Synergy grant helps our MicroClock dream come true."
Professor Martha Merrow from LMU Munich said: "The ERC Synergy format is special in that you can put a dream team together and apply for a coordinated project that goes far beyond what an individual group could accomplish. With MicroClock, we are working on one of the last frontiers of chronobiology, namely circadian clocks in the non-photosynthetic bacteria, a huge class of organisms that until very recently had no known examples of a circadian clock."
Biological clocks or circadian rhythms are exquisite cellular timing mechanisms that are widespread across nature enabling living organisms to align their lifecycle to changes that occur from day to night and across seasons.
The ERC Synergy project starts in spring 2025. For Professor Dodd and his collaborators, the ambitions extend far beyond this timescale: "Our vision is to build a new field: this award will build a legacy that lasts well beyond this grant because the trainees, the post-doctoral researchers and the technical staff we employ will, we hope, go on to establish their own groups to and make further discoveries in this fascinating and vital field."
The ERC Synergy Grants are designed to foster collaboration between outstanding researchers, enabling them to combine their expertise, knowledge and resources to push the boundaries of scientific discovery. This funding is part of the EU's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.
President of the European Research Council, Prof. Maria Leptin, said: "It is so inspiring to see how the Synergy Grants bring together remarkable researchers from many disciplines, countries and even continents, united by their ambition to tackle difficult research questions. Many of the teams include a researcher based outside Europe, which shows the global and open character of these grants. Congratulations to all the winners - I much look forward to following their progress as they push our boundaries of knowledge."
