An international, interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Göttingen University has been awarded a Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP) research grant for the project “Noise or signal? Information fidelity at the edge of jamming”. The award is worth 1.2 million dollars for 3 years. Together with academics from New York University and Hokkaido University in the US and Japan, the funding will enable the development of innovative and international training and exchange of expertise, methods and new materials. This will support an interdisciplinary team of researchers to investigate the biophysical properties of biological and synthetic materials and develop ways to measure and understand signalling within cell materials.
Principal investigator and MBExC member Professor Timo Betz at Göttingen University’s Faculty of Physics explains: “This funding will enable us to explore a completely original idea: that active forces and fluctuations in intracellular crowding are used by living systems to control key chemical reaction rates.”
You can find the press release here.
Using highly focused laser beams, the team can use light to grab and move particles inside the cells. This enables us to determine and modify the physical properties inside cells which will be compared to possible changes of chemical reaction rates in response to active mechanical fluctuations and changes in molecular crowding. Photo: Till Münker
