Das Institut für Zellbiologie der Universität Bern umfasst diverse Forschungsgruppen die sich mit einem breiten Spektrum an Organismen, experimentellen Techniken und aktuellen Themen befassen.
Besondere Schwerpunkte liegen aber in der RNA Biologie, Molekulare Parasitologie und Neuro-/Entwicklungsbiologie.
Researchers from the ICB and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel highlight the finding of a potential drug target against Malaria. A recent report by Jennison et al. from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia, reveals an important role for plasmepsin V in the development of malaria transmission stages. The authors showed that plasmepsin V activity is critical for protein export in these stages and that specific inhibitors block parasite transmission to mosquitoes.
Cristina Hohener was awarded a Dr. Lutz Zwillenberg Prize at the Dies Academicus 2019 for her PhD thesis entitled " Characterization of dicer-like enzymes in Paramecium tetraurelia”.
Cristina discovered and characterised new properties of Dicer enzymes that enable them to produce sequence-specific small intervening RNAs (also called "small interference RNAs"). These small RNA molecules play a role in protecting the genome against invading mobile DNA elements such as transposons. This new feature allows Paramecium to recognise the newly produced RNA fragments more specifically and target unwanted DNA more efficiently.
An international scientific consortium led by the cell biologists Volker Heussler from the University of Bern and Oliver Billker from the Umeå University in Sweden has for the first time systematically investigated the genome of the malaria parasite Plasmodium throughout its life cycle in a large-scale experiment. The researchers were able to identify hundreds of targets that are urgently needed in drug and vaccine development to eradicate the disease.
Phosphoinositides (or phosphatidylinositol phosphates, PIPs) are low-abundance embrane
phospholipids that act, in conjunction with their binding partners, as important constitutive signals defining biochemical organelle identity as well as membrane trafficking and signal transduction at eukaryotic cellular membranes. In this review, we present roles for PIP residues and PIPbinding proteins in endocytosis and autophagy in protist parasites such as Trypanosoma brucei, Toxoplasma gondii, Plasmodium falciparum, Entamoeba histolytica,andGiardia lamblia.Molec-ular parasitologists with an interest in comparative cell and molecular biology of membrane traf-ficking in protist lineages beyond the phylum Apicomplexa, along with cell and molecular biologists generally interested in the diversification of membrane trafficking in eukaryotes, will hopefully find this review to be a useful resource.
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