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Dr Katarina Barley, Member of the European Parliament, visited the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig on Tuesday, 30 April 2024. She was accompanied by Braunschweig's Mayor Dr Thorsten Kornblum and other party colleagues. During the visit, the management of the HZI, led by Prof. Josef Penninger and Christian Scherf, presented the current research program and the future strategy of the center. They also provided insights into the management of research data and the use of artificial intelligence.

Today, around 70 students from years 5 to 9 visited the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig to get an idea of what it is like to work in a modern research facility. They got a taste of the world of science and its administration in ten scientific and two administrative departments.

The antimicrobial potential of CRISPR-Cas systems is promising, yet how to best design or implement CRISPR nucleases remains poorly understood. An international team led by the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg has now addressed this knowledge gap. The researchers conducted the first systematic interrogation of CRISPR antimicrobials using multidrug-resistant and hypervirulent bacteria as case studies, revealing wide variations in efficacy that could be predicted via high-throughput screening and machine learning. Their findings were published today in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

The so-called B cells are part of the immune system's memory. Their memories of previous infections or vaccinations provide the template for antibodies that have a protective effect the next time they come into contact with a pathogen. Researchers at TWINCORE, Centre for Clinical and Experimental Infection Research, have now been able to show that the combination of infection and subsequent vaccination in the case of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus even protects against future variants of the virus by the memory cells virtually predicting the future. The team describes how this works in the European Journal of Immunology. The TWINCORE is a joint institution of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School (MHH).

Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) rely on working with laboratory animals to research infectious diseases in more detail and to understand the complex interactions between pathogens and their hosts. To this end, the HZI operates a central animal facility for breeding and keeping mice and hamsters.

Leukemia is the most common cancer in children. Cancer treatment severely weakens the children's immune system and they can easily develop opportunistic infections. One of the most common causes of such complications is the cytomegalovirus (CMV) from the herpes virus family. The department “Viral Immunology” headed by Prof. Luka Cicin-Sain at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig is now investigating immunotherapy options against CMV. The project is enabled by a donation from the Günter Hansmeier Krebsstiftung in Braunschweig, which is funding the position of a doctoral researcher for three years.