Yvonne Nygård

In this project, the focus is on constructing microbes, yeasts and filamentous fungi (molds) that are used for biotechnological production of aromatic biochemicals. These chemicals are used in the manufacture of various medicines or as additives in cosmetics or food. Today, most aromatic chemicals are produced from oil, through polluting chemical reactions. Thus, the need for new, sustainable production methods is urgent. The production of biochemicals will be improved through new cutting-edge technology, using genetic scissors and biosensors, genetic tools that can measure the content of chemicals produced by the cells. The biosensors developed will serve as tools to determine what genetic engineering can be done to increase the production and to evaluate strain performance. Strains will be constructed and characterized in high-throughput to ensure success and increase knowledge. More productive microbial cell factories are needed for bio-based chemicals to be competitive and applied industrially.

Johannes Kabisch

Through the processes of evolution bacteria have developed to survive the harshest of environments. One of the strategies is to protect their blueprint for life, their DNA, in so called spores. These dormant spores can persist for thousands of years and upon encountering a sustainable environment return to a normal life and propagate. We are in daily contact with such spores, some are used as probiotics helping us to recover our intestinal flora, while others are being used as a bio-friendly means to support agriculture. The PolySpore project will use this naturally evolved “DNA-safe” as a platform to develop novel, extremly strong materials as well as biological super-hard drives allowing us to safely store DNA-encoded data protected by the spores.

Christoffer Clemmensen

The increasing prevalence of obesity represents a growing threat to public health. Challengingly, obesity is a rather treatment-resistant condition and many patients do not obtain the benefits of pharmacological or lifestyle-based interventions. Notably, human genetic studies point to an important role for glutamatergic neurotransmission and neurostructural changes in body weight regulation and obesity pathogenesis. However, this biology is incompletely understood and has yet to undergo pharmacological scrutiny for obesity treatment. In this project proposal the overarching aim is to dissect the importance of the glutamatergic NDMA receptor and its related signaling complex, in physiological and pharmacological regulation of body weight homeostasis. This research holds promise to illuminate a hitherto unknown signaling pathway essential for the regulation of energy homeostasis and to evaluate its druggability for obesity treatment.

Tuomas Kilpeläinen

Obesity often leads to insulin resistance and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. However, not all individuals with obesity are similarly affected. Given the same weight gain, individuals may be either protected from or predisposed to metabolic dysfunction. This variability has been attributed to individual differences in the characteristics of the excess adipose tissue. However, there remains a lack of understanding of the specific adipose tissue properties that underlie differential responses to weight gain and obesity. The aim of the present project is to understand the adipose tissue mechanisms that either protect from or predispose to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. The project builds on human genetic findings made in large populations and applies a range of approaches to connect the genetic variants to adipose tissue biology. The new understanding emerging from the project may point towards more effective ways to treat insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

Thomas Jensen

Among its many important effects, the hormone insulin binds to antennas on heart and skeletal muscle cells and transmits a signal inside to open doorways called GLUT4 in the cells to allow glucose to enter. The ability of insulin to stimulate glucose entrance fails in a process called insulin-resistance. Insulin resistance contributes to the early development of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease and prevention and treatment strategies are therefore desirable. Insulin resistance is commonly explained by the insulin antenna failing to transmit its signal, but we suspect – based on preliminary work – that the inside of cells becomes progressively messier in insulin resistance and that GLUT4 is instead moved out of reach of the insulin signal. To test this idea in-depth in humans, we will develop new advanced microscopy tools to analyse human skeletal muscle biopsies and human 3D stem cell models of heart and skeletal muscle.

Ana Teixeira

This research program will investigate how the spatial organisation of the insulin receptor regulates its function and aims to contribute to the development of new strategies for the treatment of diabetes. Diabetes has very high and increasing prevalence worldwide. Insulin replacement therapy helps patients to keep their glucose levels within an acceptable range but it is still challenging to mimic the dynamics of endogenous insulin release, while avoiding dangerous hypoglycaemia. Therefore, there is a need to find new ways to implement insulin replacement therapy. The approach presented in this proposal uses beyond state-of-the-art nanotechnology methods to explore a new angle in diabetes treatment. Instead of focusing only on blood insulin concentrations as the treatment variable, we propose that the nanoscale organization of insulin drugs can be used as a design parameter to improve insulin replacement therapy.

Morten Arendt Rasmussen

The project aims to understand individualised human response to food intake which could potentially lead to individually tailored dietary advice.

People digest and metabolize nutrients differently and such differences have been linked to disease. Better understanding of individualized dietary responses and their links to health outcomes thus holds great potential for predicting, preventing and treating certain diseases. To do so requires integration of many different types of large, complex data sets to get the full picture and understand cause and effect relationships, and new methods will be required to fully achieve this.

This project will develop new computational methods for analysing and integrating different types of data available from an existing cohort of young adults, including continuous glucose measurements, images of meals, metabolomics data, gut microbiome samples, etc.

The methods will be shared with the scientific community and could later be used to guide and execute clinical studies on personalized nutrition for symptom relief in diseases such as asthma, allergy, obesity, and metabolic syndrome.

Søren Besenbacher

The project will develop new improved mathematical models of the mutational process to be used in the analysis and understanding of both germline and cancer mutations.

Mutation of the DNA is a truly fundamental process in biology. It occurs in all species and is the ultimate source of all genetic variation. Germline mutations – i.e., mutations that occur during the formation of egg and sperm cells – are ultimately responsible for all evolutionary adaptations and heritable diseases. Mutations occurring later in life may on the other hand turn normal cells into dangerous cancer cells. Good models of the mutational processes are therefore essential in both cancer research and studies of germline mutations and evolution.

This project will develop new methods that address specific shortcomings in how we currently model mutation processes and demonstrate the usefulness of these methods. The new methods will improve the ability to detect the activity of a specific mutational process in a tumor and make it easier to find cancer genes. Furthermore, the new germline mutation rate models created as a part of this project will help researchers find genes where new mutations cause severe diseases.

Read more about the project here.

Clarissa Schwab

Clarissa Schwab says: “About thirty percent of our food becomes waste. One big problem is food spoilage because of bacteria and fungi, which might also make the food unsafe to eat. This is a serious problem for the food industry, which needs to guarantee food safety and quality, and also wants to reduce waste. Organic acids are natural preservatives from plants and bacteria that inhibit spoiling microbes. Many different organic acids exist, but it is still not completely clear why and how these organic acids inhibit microbes, and which organic acids work best in a specific food product. BIOFUNC will investigate which organic acids are most active, and at which condition. We will use food bacteria and develop biotechnological processes in bioreactors to produce organic acids. BIOFUNC will test, whether we can prevent food spoilage in different food products, for example yogurt, bread and plant-based meat analogues. Our results will help to make food products safer in a natural way to reduce food waste.”

Photo by: Lars Kruse

Sebastian Marquardt

Sebastian Marquardt says: “Temperature fluctuations stunts plant growth and development, thus threatening yields. My proposal offers biotechnological solutions to enhance the resilience of crops to changing environments. I aim to exploit the natural ability of plants to respond to temperature fluctuations at the molecular level to promote resilience to changing climates, with an emphasis on untimely cold. My research group identified RNA molecules at the center of plant gene regulation: short promoter-proximal RNAs (sppRNAs). I propose to use sppRNAs to activate cold-tolerance genes in tomato. My proposal will exploit RNA biotechnology as a new principle of gene expression control to promote climate resilience. Engineering increased cold tolerance through sppRNA-mediated gene regulation pathway in tomato has a high potential to translate into a new strategy for “climate-smart agriculture” with both greater resilience to climate change and more sustainable crop production.”