On March 13th CBU group leaders gathered at the Thon Hotel Rosenkrantz Bergen for the workshop to discuss science and strategies.

Today we received the results of the Research Council’s evaluation of the CBU activity over the last ten years. We received very good publicity and top marks in both organization and research quality, as well as almost full pot in “societal impact”. Congratulations to everyone at CBU!

Our group leader Markus Miettinen has been a visiting scholar at KIAS in Seoul for two weeks where he gave an invited talk: High-fidelity Biomolecular Modeling of Disordered Biomolecules.

On March 12th Håkon Tjeldnes successfully defended his PhD thesis titled: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Translatome.
Protein synthesis, also called translation, is a fundamental process in gene regulation. The translation process consists simply of molecules, called ribosomes, using RNA as a template to create proteins that the cell needs. However, it has been uncovered that translation processes are much more complex than initially assumed. To explore protein synthesis at a detailed level, the development of “Ribo-seq,” also known as Ribosome Profiling data, has been crucial. Ribo-seq is a molecular biological technique that enables the observation of ribosome activity. In his work, he has focused on current challenges in the field by proposing practical and applicable solutions. The thesis presents a collection of tools specifically developed for the analysis of Ribo-seq data. These contributions aim to fill existing gaps in the field and provide researchers with valuable resources to expand their understanding of translation processes: www.ribocrypt.org

Welcoming our new colleagues at CBU: Yasin Tharak Miran, Senior Engineer and Christoph Bottin, Head Engineer. Great to have them on board!

We are welcoming a new PhD student at CBU! Florian Pierre Echelard has Master’s degree in Bioinformatics, specialized in biostatistics and structural bioinformatics from Nantes Universitéstarted. His PhD project is a part of the collaboration between labs with expertise in Bioinformatics, Deep Learning and Biochemistry under the supervision of prof. Nathalie Reuter. The goal is to further the knowledge of Peripheral Membrane Proteins using a combination of data and pipelines already developed and more recent work.

Postdoc Anna-Simone Frank and Prof. Susanna Röblitz from CBU spent a week at the California Institute of Technology for a workshop on mathematical modelling of macrophage polarization. Their research visit was funded by a grant from AIM’s SQuaREs program.

This week we have welcomed Fynn Frederic Wolf as our new PhD student. Fynn received his Master’s degree in Physics with specialization in biophysics from the University of Copenhagen in 2021. PhD topic will be on the formation of stress granules. The focus will lie on the description and modelling of the system pathway. Wolf will be supervised by prof. Sushma Nagaraja Grellscheid and prof. Susanna Röblitz from the Department of Informatics.

Parveen Gartan and Belén García Pascual have been awarded a PhD internship from Digital Life Norway. Parveen is a PhD student at the Dpt of Chemistry and CBU in the Reuter group and will spend three-months at Astra Zeneca. Belén is at the Dpt of Mathematics, in the CBU-affiliated Stochastic Biology Group and will spend her internship at DNV. CBU is proud and excited to see Parveen and Belén going to explore opportunities outside the academic “bubble”.