Maria Leptin is the President of the ERC, the European Research Council, and Professor of genetics at the University of Cologne. In this episode, Maria describes her own path as one driven by observat...

25 - 27 November 2025 (Komenského nám. 2, Roger Scruton Hall)

Alu elements are short repeats that occupy approximately 10% of the human genome. Saturation of primate genomes with Alu sequences occurred at the prosimian/new-world monkey evolutionary juncture. Alu...

Telomerase counteracts telomere shortening by repeatedly adding DNA repeats to chromosome ends. We identified the replication protein A (RPA) heterotrimer as a telomerase processivity factor critical ...

Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) employ diverse and distinctive mechanisms of cDNA synthesis to protect bacteria against viral infection. However, much of DRT family diversity remains ...

The shelterin complex protects chromosome ends from aberrant DNA repair and regulates telomerase access to telomeres. Shelterin is composed of six pro…

SNAP-tag is a widespread tool for labeling protein for bioimaging. Now, Kühn et al. report SNAP-tag2 with increased labeling kinetics and brightness, which translates into a better performance in live...

Zaza and colleagues demonstrate that DNA-PAINT on a spinning disk confocal microscope with optical photon reassignment enables high-resolution imaging across large fields and imaging depths, resolving...

A suite of bridged rhodamine dyes (BriDyes) offers excellent brightness, solubility, photostability, and tunable cell permeability along with resistance to photoblueing, making them exceptional all-pu...

The Scientific Council of the European Research Council welcomes the offer of substantial additional budget from the European Commission for the development of a new ERC funding instrument offering la...

How genomic DNA is folded during cell division to form the characteristic rod-shaped mitotic chromosomes essential for faithful genome inheritance is …

Here the authors reveal how telomeres signal mitotic stress. A key protein network alters their structure exposing telomere ends to signal mitotic stress, ultimately triggering a controlled DNA damage...

Job Details: A full-time Postdoctoral Research Associate position is available at the University of Kansas Department of Ph

DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) are widely considered the most cytotoxic DNA lesions occurring in cells because they physically disrupt the connectivity of the DNA double helix. Homologous recombinati...

Szmyd et al. show that DNA repair pathways impact whether cells with DNA lesions arrest in mitosis. The formation of homologous recombination-driven double Holliday junctions elicits mitotic cell deat...

The shelterin complex protects chromosome ends from the DNA damage repair machinery and regulates telomerase access to telomeres. Shelterin is composed of six proteins (TRF1, TRF2, TIN2, TPP1, POT1 an...

Measuring single DNA loop extrusion steps of individual eukaryotic SMCs revealed that ATP binding induces a DNA twist of −0.6.

Szalay et al. discuss cross-kingdom similarities and differences in 3D chromatin folding in relation to gene regulation, including in bacteria, archaea, mammals and plants. This comparison reveals cer...

Telomere dysfunction, usually owing to shortening, activates cellular senescence and can contribute to age-associated diseases and cancer. Mouse models are crucial for telomere research, but human and...

Non-homologous end joining repairs most double stranded DNA breaks in human cells. Here, the authors apply a single-molecule imaging approach visualizing the recruitment of DNA repair proteins to DNA ...