The June sessions asks:
How can we feed the world?

What are we going to eat tomorrow? The trend is towards back to nature and organically farmed food, away from genetically modified products. But then, is it possible to feed 7 billion people organically farmed, when already today 3 billion don’t have access to clean drinking water? Water shortage, environmental toxins and nutrition-depleted soils make plants vulnerable. Sounds like GMOs would be just the solution. You are welcome to join the discussion.

5 June 2012, 20:00
GrooveStation Dresden (Katharinenstr. 11-13)
free admission

These experts will be available for discussion:
Kai Simons, MPI-CBG
Michael Weichert, Member of Saxon Parliament
Henryk Flachowsky, Julius-Kühn-Institut (JKI), Dresden-Pillnitz
Christoph Neinhuis, TU Dresden

www.groovestation.de/sciencecafe

www.facebook.com/ScienceCafeDD

Be ready to visit us on 6 July 2012 from 18:00-1:00. Learn more about the MPI-CBG at our many stations, see spectacular science, live cells and model organisms, and try some hands-on experiments. A more detailed programme will follow soon.

Drinks and snacks will be available in the cafeteria.

Wieland Huttner, director at the MPI-CBG, emphasized that the commitment of the institute to the girls' day activities of the past ten years showed that the institute had always been aiming high when it comes to dual career and work-life balance issues. 40 high school students visited the MPI-CBG in the morning to learn more about career opportunities in the field of molecular cell biology and genetics - four staff members shared their everyday experience with them. 

Look behind the scenes of modern research in a guided tour through the labs of the MPI-CBG. Take this opportunity to learn more about what scientific research really means. Over 45 nations are working here under one roof, in an architecturally-significant building that fosters communication and echoes our flat organizational structure. And watch scientists at work at the institute that was voted the number one place in the world to do a postdoc in the "Best Place to Work" survey.

Obscura Day is an international celebration of unusual places, full of expeditions, back room tours & explorations of the hidden wonders in your own hometown.

Get (free) ticket.

The presentation will start at 10:00 in the MPI-CBG auditorium. Ask your questions: What is it like to be a scientist? Can you do research and have a family? Afterwards, there will be tours through the building: See zebrafish, worms, and fruit flies, have a look at the labs and see how people work!

Girls’ Day, an initiative of the Federal Ministries for Education and Research (BMBF), and for Family Affairs, the Elderly, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ), was designed to motivate and encourage particularly girls to seize their career options and to decide in favour of a qualified vocational training or degree. Subsequently, they choose an occupation even in professional fields that are presently not typically female.

Christian Eckmann, research group leader at the MPI-CBG, has been awarded the highly prestigious and competitive Program Grant Award. These grants are awarded for novel collaborations among highly interdisciplinary teams of scientists working in different countries and provide three years support with up to 450,000 USD per year. Christian Eckmann will share his award with Clifford Brangwynne (Princeton University, USA) and Sua Myong, (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, USA). Their joint project will study in a multi-scale approach the role that RNA helicases play in the underlying molecular dynamics and structural fluidity of RNP bodies.

Nadine Vastenhouw has been awarded the highly prestigious and competitive Career Development Award. This award is designed to assist HFSP Long Term Fellows in their transition to independence – it comes with a total amount of 300,000 USD for 3 years to support establishing an own research program. Nadine currently works as a postdoc in Alexander Schier’s group at Harvard and will join the MPI-CBG Faculty as Research Group Leader in May 2012. She will study the role of chromatin in gene regulation during developmental transitions in the vertebrate embryo.

Pavel Tomancak’s 2008 Young Investigator Grant has been renewed. It happened for the first time in HFSP history that such a grant has been renewed! Tomancak’s group is interested in the nature of the constraints that have led to the remarkable morphological conservation in early development of animals within each major animal group (phylum). The so-called phylotypic period is preceded and followed by greater morphological diversity resulting in the characteristic hourglass pattern of divergence. The Tomancak Lab is extremely happy to be able to continue the productive collaboration on the developmental hourglass model with Casey Bergman (Manchester) and Uwe Ohler (Duke). Importantly Alex Kalinka (MPI-CBG), the post-doctoral fellow instrumental for the hourglass analysis and the formulation of the renewal proposal, will be again joining the HFSP dream team.

Congratulations to the successful applicants from everybody at the MPI-CBG!

The Human Frontier Science Program is an international program of research support. Its aims are to promote intercontinental collaboration and training for people from postdoc to mature group leaders in cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research focused on the life sciences. HFSPO receives financial support from the governments or research councils of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, UK, USA, as well as from the European Union.
www.hfsp.org

The analysis, which is a dramatic new example of the collective behavior of interacting molecules, provides insight into the logistics of intracellular transport. Traffic jams occurred when the motor density exceeded a critical value or when motor dissociation from the microtubule ends was so slow that it resulted in a pileup. Transport kinesins are moving moderately slow and dissociate from microtubules rapidly – this may be evolutionary adaptations to avoid the formation of traffic jams in cells.

Caption:
Kinesin motors, which walk in a highly-processive manner towards the plus end of a microtubule, form traffic jams due to their propensity to stay associated with the end for an extended period of time. The associated slow-down of individual motors labeled with a green fluorophore has been experimentally visualized by single-molecule microscopy in the background of many motors labeled with a red fluorophore (see kymograph in the lower panel).

Cécile Leduc, Kathrin Padberg-Gehle, Vladimír Varga, Dirk Helbing, Stefan Diez,
and Jonathon Howard:
Molecular crowding creates traffic jams of kinesin motors on microtubules
PNAS Early Edition, 19 March 2012
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1107281109

CUDA is NVIDIA’s parallel computing architecture that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics processing units (GPUs). The NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence program recognizes, rewards and fosters collaboration with leading institutions at the forefront of parallel computing research. 

TU Dresden with its partners Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) acting under the common roof of the DRESDEN-concept e.V.  joins 17 elite institutions worldwide that have demonstrated a unique vision for improving the technology and application of parallel computing, and empowering academics and scientists to conduct world-changing research. CUDA Center of Excellence members are provided with NVIDIA GPU equipment and research grants.

Members from the Center for Information Service and HPC (ZIH), TU Dresden and HZDR are leveraging NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate highly complex simulations of the inner workings of plasma, as they are used in modern cancer therapy and fusion reactors.   As a result, researchers were able reduce time to process scientific calculations from weeks to a few days.   In addition, by accelerating expensive and complex experiments in Biology and Radiology, system utilization is increased, enabling research in other areas to benefit from GPU computing.  

Due to these rich benefits enabled by GPU computing, Simunova, a developer of generic programming methods for computational sciences, such as the matrix template library (MTL), decided to join the center.

“GPU computing is an integral technology that enables the acceleration of time-critical simulations in the computational sciences”, says Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel, TU Dresden – director of the center – and adds: “I am impressed by the creativity of the scientists of the different research areas in using this modern technology.   They help position Dresden as a leader in the ongoing footrace for new scientific advances.”

As part of this cooperation the scientists from the areas of biology, computer science, physics, mechanical engineering, medicine, and mathematics as well as the industry partners use synergies in research and development also in other research fields.  Hence, they offer practical education in GPU accelerated computational simulations to students of TU Dresden. Furthermore, leading experts in various fields that also use GPU computing will present their work in monthly seminars and an annual workshop in Dresden to also offer a stage for discussion and further cooperation.

“NVIDIA congratulates TU Dresden and its partners on achieving this special recognition,” says Stefan Kraemer, NVIDIA sales director HPC – education.  “TU Dresden is the first German institution to receive CUDA Center of Excellence status, joining other world-renowned universities and institutions that are using GPUs to accelerate scientific research, including the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Cambridge University, Stanford University, and the University of Moscow.”

The NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence program is competitive and prestigious, and any institution with a demonstrated commitment to both parallel computing research and education may apply for CCOE status.
For more information visit: research.nvidia.com/content/cuda-centers-excellence.

Research groups utilizing GPU computing at TU Dresden include:  Prof. Cown (HZDR, Radiation Physics), Dr. Gerbeth (HZDR, Fluid Dynamics), Dr. Gottschling (SimuNova), Prof. Gumhold (TU Dresden, Computer Science, Computer Graphics and Visualization), Prof. Hochberger (TU Dresden, Computer Science, Embedded Systems), Prof. Koch (TU Dresden, Medical Faculty), Prof. Lehner (TU Dresden, Computer Science, Databases), Prof. Nagel (TU Dresden, ZIH / Computer Science, Computer Architecture), Dr. Posselt (HZDR, Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research), Prof. Schroer (TU Dresden , Structural Physics), PD Dr. Stiller (TU Dresden, Fluid Dynamics), Prof. Tetzlaff (Tu Dresden, Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering), Prof. Voigt (TU Dresden, Computation Science), and Prof. Zerial (MPI-CBG).

also see tu-dresden.de (in German)

official website: ccoe-dresden.de/