For its cross-regional collaboration, the DEEP-DV research consortium (“Disrupt – Evade – Exploit: Gene expression and manipulation of the host response in DNA virus infections”) has been awarded the 2026 North German Science Prize. The consortium, jointly headed by Prof. Nicole Fischer (University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE)) and Prof. Melanie Brinkmann (Technische Universität Braunschweig and Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI)), is investigating how DNA viruses evade the immune system and remain in the body permanently. Since 2012, the federal states of Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein have used this prize to recognize cooperation projects across a range of disciplines; this year’s award focuses on the life sciences. Three projects were honored, each receiving prize money of 83,333 euros.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a rod-shaped, Gram-negative bacterium capable of infecting various parts of the body, including the lungs, skin, and bloodstream. It accounts for approximately 7 per cent of hospital-acquired infections worldwide and is linked to around 559,000 deaths annually. Researchers from the group of Prof. Michael Kolbe at the Centre for Structural System Biology (CSSB), along with collaborators from Research Center Jülich, EMBL Hamburg, DESY and BIOTECH Thailand have uncovered novel virulence mechanisms of phospholipase C from P. aeruginosa. Their findings are published in Protein & Cell and shed new light on how this pathogen evades host defenses and causes severe disease. The CSSB is a common initiative by nine northern German research institutions, including the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig.

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest challenges facing modern medicine. A new class of programmable antibiotics known as asobiotics can be used to treat bacterial infections when classical antibiotics fail. A team of researchers from TWINCORE, Centre for Experimental and Clinical Infection Research, the RESIST Cluster of Excellence and from the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg has now studied, how bacteria adapt to asobiotics. They recently published their finding in Nature Communications. TWINCORE and HIRI are sites of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in cooperation with Hannover Medical School and Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, respectively.