Scientists at the University of Manchester (UK) hope a major breakthrough could lead to more effective methods for detoxifying dangerous pollutants like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and dioxins. The result is a culmination of 15 years of research and has been published in Nature on 19 October. It details how certain organisms manage to lower the toxicity of pollutants.
Neural stem cells – master cells that can develop into any type of nerve cell – are able to generate mini “first aid kits” and transfer them to immune cells. This is the result of a study published today in Molecular Cell, and led by ERC grantee Prof. Stefano Pluchino, based at the University of Cambridge (UK).
We are living longer and, understandably, we wish to be in better health as we age. It is estimated that by 2050 the number of people aged 65 and over will reach 16% of the global population. Medical science has an ever-growing arsenal of drugs it can use to treat an increasing range of conditions. Yet, these drugs are not acting as effectively as their potential promises. Dr. Armağan Koçer and her research team at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) are using their ERC funding to tackle the following puzzle: how can we develop methods of drug delivery that are as revolutionary as the medicine they contain?
In every ecological community, some species are abundant while others - usually the majority - are rare. This distribution of abundance remains constant over time, but the individual species within this distribution are not static: some rare species may become common while others may become locally extinct. These on-going, natural changes are likely to be accelerated in response to climate change or disturbances such as the arrival of invasive species.
In 2012, 2.8 million people in the EU were diagnosed with cancer. It is the second most common cause of death in the Union – three out of 10 deaths for men, and two out of 10 deaths for women – a figure that is expected to rise due to the ageing European population. Dr Danijela Matic Vignjevic’s STARLIN project is using ERC funding to understand how normal cells become cancerous and spread.
The use of biomass from plants as a renewable energy source is not new. Yet surprisingly, the positive net economic and environmental benefits of biomass energy exist only on paper. This is about to change thanks to the largest experimental tree plantation in the world, which takes place in East Flanders. Professor Reinhart Ceulemans and his team are working to get the numbers needed to inform evidence-based decisions on the role of renewables in future energy policies.
If Darwin could have scuba dived, he would have enjoyed the East African lakes: Victoria, Malawi and Tanganyika. Here live the cichlids – a colourful fish which has evolved rapidly into thousands of species, emulating and surpassing Darwin's finches in the Galapagos. Prof. Walter Salzburger, an Austrian researcher, is using his ERC grants to study the diversity of cichlids from ecological, morphological and genetic viewpoints. He believes these unique fish provide an ideal model system to understand the "how" and the "why" in questions of evolutionary biology: questions that relate to all life on earth.
