- Three LMU researchers working in international teams have been awarded prestigious Synergy Grants by the European Research Council.
- The funded projects explore the internal clocks of bacteria, the origin of life, and the properties of exoplanets.
No fewer than three researchers from LMU are part of international research teams to have received a Synergy Grant - chronobiologist Prof. Martha Merrow, systems biophysicist Prof. Dieter Braun, and astrophysicist Prof. Kevin Heng. The Synergy Grant is one of the most prestigious research awards given out by the European Research Council (ERC). Highly competitive, the grant supports pioneering projects that can only be accomplished through the interdisciplinary cooperation of two to four teams of researchers and lead to advances at the frontier of knowledge. Grant recipients get funding of up to 14 million euros for a period of up to six years.
ERC Synergy Grant projects at LMU
Chronobiology: the internal clock of bacteria
Chronobiologist Prof. emerita Martha Merrow was Director of the Institute of Medical Psychology at LMU until 2023. She currently leads the Molecular Chronobiology research group there. Merrow is spokesperson of the project MicroClock (The Bacillus subtilis circadian clock: from molecules to mutualism), which has been awarded 8.3 million euros in funding over six years. Together with project partners in England (Prof. Antony Dodd, John Innes Centre, Norwich) and the Netherlands (Prof. Ákos T. Kovács, Leiden University), Merrow will investigate how this circadian clock works in Bacillus subtilis and how it influences the internal clocks of plants and yeast. This trinational collaboration has received the first ever Synergy Grant at LMU's Faculty of Medicine. The internal clock in B. subtilis is primarily active when the bacteria form a multicellular complex called biofilm. This is relevant for both ecological and pathological situations. "The results of our work will therefore be of great importance beyond basic biology and could, for example, be of relevance for the timing of antibiotic administration in patients or for the optimization of clinical conditions mediated by the microbiome," says Merrow.
Origin of life in heated gas bubbles
Dieter Braun is Professor of Systems Biophysics at LMU, a member of the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, and spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Centre "Molecular evolution in prebiotic environments." His research looks into the molecular foundations of the origin of life. In the project BubbleLife (From RNA-peptide coevolution to cellular life at heated air bubbles), which has received six million euros in funding over six years, Braun is collaborating with Prof. Hannes Mutschler (Technical University of Dortmund, speaker) to investigate what conditions had to exist on the young Earth for molecules to join together and to form the precursors of organic life and herald the beginning of biological evolution. The researchers aim to retrace the path from the Darwinian evolution of RNA and peptides to the origin of the first cells. Although this presumably took millions of years to happen, the experiments to simulate the process in test tubes will take a few weeks. If all goes well, the team's interdisciplinary work will eventually lead to synthetically produced "protocell generators." As Dieter Braun explains: "BubbleLife will hopefully fundamentally change our understanding of the origin of life on Earth - and possibly elsewhere in the universe."
Properties of rocky exoplanets
Kevin Heng is Chair Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics of Extrasolar Planets at LMU and a member of the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster. In the project GEOASTRONOMY (Exploring the chemical foundations for rocky exoplanets around Sun-like stars), which has been granted funding of around ten million euros over six years, the astrophysicist is collaborating with Prof. Stephen Mojzsis (spokesperson, HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences) and Prof. Fabrice Gaillard (CNRS Orleans) to research the properties of rocky exoplanets. Just in our galaxy alone, there are thought to be billions of such planets orbiting Sun-like stars. The researchers plan to obtain comprehensive knowledge about their chemical and physical properties in an approach that combines astrophysical with geoscientific principles. Their work will concentrate on three categories of exoplanet that might possess specific kinds of atmospheres: sub-Neptunes, super-Earths, and ultra-short period (USP) exoplanets. "Our goal is to create the chemical foundations for understanding the atmospheres of these three types of rocky exoplanets and make our findings available to the exoplanet community," says Kevin Heng.
