Three-dimensional multicellular human liver model: For the first time, a 3D human organoid model, developed with liver tissue from patients, consists of three liver cell types, derived from adult hepatocytes, cholangiocytes, and liver mesenchymal cells.

Retaining structure and function: The novel complex organoid models, or assembloids, reconstruct essential structural and functional features of the human periportal liver region and have patient-specific traits. They capture key aspects of human liver physiology in a dish, including drug detoxification and metabolism.

Liver disease investigation: When manipulated, this human periportal liver model can mimic several characteristics of biliary fibrosis. It provides a platform to study liver diseases in humans, accelerate the development of new drugs, enable early diagnosis, and advance personalized medicine.

Liver disease is a major global health problem, causing over two million deaths worldwide each year. While animal models have helped to understand liver biology, they often fail to accurately translate to human biology. Due to the liver’s unique architecture, existing human models fail to replicate the complex interactions between different cell types in the liver and accurately show how diseases progress. Existing tissue-derived liver organoid models consist of only one cell type and fail to replicate the complex cellular composition and tissue architecture, such as the liver periportal region. Complex 3D multicellular models that capture human liver portal cellular interactions do not exist for adult human liver tissue yet. This limits the ability to study liver disease and develop new treatments.

Previous liver models

The research group of Meritxell Huch, director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, started to address this issue in a previous study in 2021 (Dynamic cell contacts between periportal mesenchyme and ductal epithelium act as a rheostat for liver cell proliferation, Cordero-Espinoza, Lucía et al., Cell Stem Cell, Volume 28, Issue 11, DOI), where the researchers developed a liver organoid consisting of two cell types, cholangiocyte and mesenchyme cells, but still lacked other periportal cell types – most importantly hepatocytes, the cells that build the majority of liver mass. In 2025, the research group of Meritxell Huch was able to create a next-generation organoid model, composed of three liver cell types of the mouse – adult hepatocytes, cholangiocytes, and liver mesenchymal cells – to reconstruct the mouse liver periportal region. (Mouse periportal liver assembloids recapitulate mesoscale hepatic architecture and biliary fibrosis, 29th May 2025, Nature, DOI)

Developing a multicellular human liver model

In the recent study, published in the journal Nature, researchers from the group of Meritxell Huch, together with colleagues from the group of Andrej Shevchenko at the MPI-CBG, from the group of Daniel Stange at the Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital (UKD) Dresden and the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT/UCC), and from the groups of Daniel Seehofer and Georg Damm at the Clinic for Visceral, Transplant, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery at the Leipzig University Medical Center, developed a patient-specific human periportal liver assembloid. This advanced liver model features adult human cholangiocytes, liver mesenchymal cells, and hepatocytes, which were derived from 28 patients. It contains multiple cells, which are combined together in a process similar to LEGO. Once assembled, the cells self-organize into 3D structures that reproduce in vitro the cellular arrangements and cell-cell interactions of the tissue in vivo.

Developing the liver model was real teamwork. It involved not only the experimental scientists from the Huch lab and clinicians from Leipzig and Dresden but also bioinformaticians and technical assistants from the different labs. One of the four lead authors, Yohan Kim, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Huch group and now an assistant professor at Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea, says, “When we received the tissue from the patients, we first had to separate the individual cell types and expand them in a dish before combining them again. I researched the culture conditions for the cells to grow before being assembled, prior to my departure for my new position at Sungkyunkwan University.” The tissue from the patients was provided by the Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital (UKD) in Dresden and the Clinic for Visceral, Transplant, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery at the Leipzig University Medical Center. With the support of the research technician Robert Arnes-Benito, the culture conditions were further optimized into what are now the final culture conditions to expand human hepatocytes.

Sagarika Dawka, a doctoral student and another lead author of the study, continued the work of Yohan by finding conditions to mature the cells in vitro. She says, “I was able to develop the liver model further, so it featured bile canaliculi, which drain into the bile duct in the liver periportal region. When this bile drainage system is disrupted, it causes liver damage and disease. This is why it was so important for our liver models to include bile canaliculi. The present study is the first complex human liver model outside of the body that has bile canaliculi.”

Lei Yuan, a postdoctoral researcher and one of the lead authors, then worked on combining the cells to make the periportal assembloids. First, he labeled the different cells (liver mesenchymal cells and cholangiocytes) in order to be able to track them once combined. Then, he found the right conditions to induce their self-assembly.  “Additionally, I optimized the periportal assembloid protocol from the assembly method to the media that the cells were growing in. The proper medium is essential for promoting the cells' growth and differentiation,” says Lei.

Another lead author of the study, Anke Liebert, a postdoctoral researcher, was mainly responsible for the molecular and functional characterization of the liver models. “I was looking at how well the models were performing their function. I tested how well our liver models function compared to normal human liver cells. With the help of computational biologist Fabian Rost, I tested that the models correctly captured the gene expression of the living tissue.”

With their existing liver models, the group created a living biobank of hepatocyte organoids from 28 patients, which can be frozen and thawed to reinitiate cultures when needed.

Personalized medicine and drug development

The novel human liver model shows patient-specific traits and retains essential structural and functional features of the human periportal liver region. “We overcame a major challenge with our new model. Reconstructing the multicellular periportal liver tissue organization and cellular interactions outside of the living body hasn’t been possible so far. With our models, we can build and control different parts of the liver in a lab. This helps us understand how different cells and their surroundings work together to create a healthy liver, and, when these interactions are wrong, how diseases like biliary fibrosis arise,” says Meritxell Huch, who oversaw and supervised the study. “Our new liver models have the potential to change the way we study and treat liver diseases. They could help us develop new diagnostic tests, test the safety of new medicines, improve drug toxicity assessment, and create personalized treatments for patients with liver diseases.”

“For over 40 years, thousands of mice are bred with genetic mutations. But often, despite breeding many mice, none of the offspring have the desired mutation,” explains Ronald Naumann. “In line with the 3R principles to reduce the number of animals for research, replace them with alternative methods, and refine their treatment, we have developed a new way to test sperm from mice predictably for desired genetic mutations. This method is based on a special analysis test, the STR (Short Tandem Repeat) procedure, which enables fast and reliable identification of genetic characteristics. As a result, only offspring that are of scientific interest for the respective experiment are bred. The approach allows mice to be bred efficiently without the need for large numbers of additional animals. This has already allowed us to reduce the number of mice that were bred by around 5,600 over the past four years.”

© Ronald Naumann

Ronald has been working with laboratory animals since 1995 and established the Transgenic Core Facility at the MPI-CBG in 2002. Furthermore, he played a key role in establishing many facilities worldwide and continues to support international scientific institutions with his broad expertise.

The basis for this new technology was the following publication: Novel insights into the genetic background of genetically modified mice. Dobrowolski, Fischer, Naumann, Transgenic Res. 2018. DOI

 News article of the 3Rs Collaborative:  https://3rc.org/award-winners/

“I really felt the energy of the MPI-CBG right away and knew when I entered the building that there's just a different vibe here,” says Madalena Reimão Pinto. “I am looking forward to working with many different colleagues at the MPI-CBG and on the Dresden campus. For example, the close link to the Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD) and their expert mathematicians enables me to start thinking of questions that I just didn't even dare to think of before.”

Madalena Reimão Pinto studied Cell and Molecular Biology at the New University of Lisbon and then undertook her MSc studies in Human Molecular Genetics at Imperial College London. Afterwards, she worked as a technician at the University of Lisbon for 1.5 years and for 6 months at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge, UK. For her PhD, Madalena moved to Vienna to the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA). In 2019, she started her postdoc at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. In 2019, she received an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship, in 2021 a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 2024, a research fund for excellent junior researchers from the University of Basel. As of November 2025, Madalena is a research group leader at MPI-CBG.

“It's amazing that neural stem cell research has a long history in Dresden and that we have very well-organized facilities here at MPI-CBG that enable us to model those mutations in complex tissues,” says Matthias Muhar. “I'm also very keen on learning organoid biology here at the institute. Cerebellar organoids and cerebral organoids will be my main organoid system.”

Matthias Muhar studied biology at the University of Vienna and finished his PhD in 2018 in molecular biology at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), also in Vienna. During his PhD, he worked on the development of genetic and transcriptomic tools for the study of gene regulation in leukemia. In 2018, he received the Life Science Research Award of the Austrian Association of Molecular Life Sciences and Biotechnology. Matthias moved to Zürich in 2019 to work as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH, where he looked at the end of gene expression and what happens when gene products, proteins, are removed by cells. As of November 2025, Matthias is a research group leader at MPI-CBG.

With this award, the Signal Transduction Society recognizes Theresia’s scientific excellence in the field of signal transduction, demonstrated by her contributions to understanding insulin action during her PhD and immune sensing of nucleic acids in her postdoctoral work.

She received the prize at the 28th STS Meeting in Weimar, where she presented her latest research and delivered the laudatory speech for this year’s STS Honorary Medal Awardee Hao Wu (Harvard Medical School & Boston Children’s Hospital), who was a Valle Visiting Professor at MPI-CBG in 2025.

Theresia studied biology at the Humboldt-Universität of Berlin. After research stays at ETH Zurich and the University of Helsinki, she completed her PhD in the laboratory of Ünal Coskun at TU Dresden, where she discovered the mechanism underlying insulin receptor activation. She joined Anthony Hyman’s group at MPI-CBG in 2020 and shifted her research focus to nucleic acid-induced immune signalling and higher-order assemblies. In her postdoctoral work, she established a new research topic in the lab funded by the Walter Benjamin Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the NOMIS Foundation. She also discovered a mechanism by which the SARS-CoV-2 virus antagonizes innate immune recognition.

Congratulations!

“EMBO is delighted to welcome the new young investigators. Their outstanding achievements demonstrate the excellence and ambition that will drive progress in the life sciences. We are pleased to support these young group leaders as they take the next steps in their careers, and we look forward to their discoveries and contributions to our community,” says EMBO Director Fiona Watt.

As part of the Young Investigator Programme, Jesse Veenvliet has access to a wide range of benefits, including training and mentoring opportunities, as well as access to core facilities at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. Young investigators also receive a financial award of 15,000 euros, can apply for additional grants, and gain support for networking activities, such as joint group meetings or travelling to conferences.

Jesse Veenvliet and his group reconstruct development in a dish to understand how embryos build themselves. By guiding pluripotent stem cells to self-organize into stem-cell-based embryo models (embryonic organoids), the team investigates how cells sense and use their physiological microenvironment to sculpt the body plan with remarkable robustness. “I’m thrilled to join this lively and inspiring network. The EMBO YIP community brings together an incredible group of talented and passionate researchers across disciplines, and I’m excited about the opportunities this opens for me, my team, and our work,” says Jesse Veenvliet.

EMBO is an organization of more than 2,100 leading researchers that promotes excellence in the life sciences in Europe and beyond. The major goals of the organization are to support talented researchers at all stages of their careers, stimulate the exchange of scientific information, and help build a research environment where scientists can achieve their best work. The administrative EMBO headquarters is in Heidelberg, Germany.

EMBO press release: https://www.embo.org/press-releases/twenty-eight-group-leaders-become-embo-young-investigators/

EMBL Council selected Anthony A. Hyman as next Director General: In his new role, Hyman will be responsible for overall leadership, strategic direction, and management of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

Mandate will commence on 31 March 2026: Hyman will assume his role at the EMBL in Heidelberg in April 2026, taking over EMBL’s leadership from Interim Director General Peer Bork and Interim Executive Director Ewan Birney.

At its winter meeting, the Council of EMBL selected Anthony A. Hyman, who is currently a Director at the Max Planck Instititute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), as EMBL’s next Director General. Hyman’s mandate will begin on 31 March 2026, when he will take over EMBL’s leadership from Interim Director General Peer Bork and Interim Executive Director Ewan Birney.

“I am pleased to announce the decision by the EMBL Council to elect Anthony Hyman as future EMBL Director General,” says Peter Becker, EMBL Council Chair. “Tony witnessed the spirit of EMBL early on in his splendid career. He is a visionary and experienced scientist, who is very well suited to leading EMBL as it continues to innovate and build on its strong foundations.”

“I will be joining EMBL as its next Director General at a moment when the life sciences are changing rapidly, and when the institute’s role across Europe has never been more important,”  says Hyman. “New technologies are giving us access to molecular, cellular, and tissue-level information at a precision and scale that simply did not exist a decade ago. Together with modern computational approaches, including AI, this creates a real opportunity to connect molecular mechanisms to the organisation of cells and tissues in ways that were not possible before.

Hyman continues, "My new position will greatly benefit from the expertise I gained at MPI-CBG, where I was one of the founding directors in 1998.  Everyone needs some luck in life, and mine was to be given the opportunity to move to Dresden and be involved in founding this institute. It has been an honor to be part of building this institute in Dresden, and I would like to express my gratitude to all my colleagues at MPI-CBG and to the Max Planck Society for these fulfilling 25 years."

“This is a great opportunity for Tony, and we are happy to see him take on this new challenge," says Stephan Grill, Managing Director of the MPI-CBG. “At the same time, Tony will be deeply missed here at MPI-CBG. He has been a key part of our success as one of the founding directors. But, we are looking forward to the chance to strengthen the connections between MPI-CBG and EMBL in the future!”

Hyman is one of four founding directors of, and group leader at, the MPI-CBG in Dresden, Germany. He held the role of the institute’s Managing Director from 2010-2013 and from 2021-2023 and currently also holds a Professorship of Molecular Biology at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. 

From 1993 to 1999, Hyman was a Group Leader and Visiting Senior Scientist at EMBL Heidelberg. He studied Zoology at University College London before moving to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC in Cambridge, England for his doctoral research. He obtained his PhD in 1988 (awarded by King’s College, Cambridge University), and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco, USA. 

Hyman’s research focuses on unravelling the intricacies of biological condensates and phase separation in health and disease. Biomolecular condensates are a class of membrane-less organelles that carry out different functions within the cell. The research group of Anthony Hyman studies how phase separation impacts the formation of such membraneless compartmentalisation of macromolecules inside living cells. Understanding how and why condensates form and how they can transform into irreversible protein aggregates has important relevance for studying neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and Alzheimer’s disease. 

His research has received some of the highest accolades, including the EMBO Gold Medal (2003), the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2011) for his work on microtubules and cell division, the Körber European Science Prize (2022), and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2023) for discovering a fundamental mechanism of cellular organisation mediated by phase separation of proteins and RNA into membraneless liquid droplets. Hyman is a Fellow of the Royal Society (2007) and is an elected member of EMBO (2000), the Academia Europaea (2014), the National Academy of Sciences (2020), the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2021), and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2023). 

Press Release of EMBL: https://www.embl.org/news/people-perspectives/embl-council-announces-next-embl-director-general/

Mertixell Huch, who is also a Honorary Professor at TU Dresden, focusesses on fundamental principles underlying the maintenance and repair of adult tissues, as well as the mechanisms by which their dysregulation contributes to disease. Her research includes 3D organoid models of the stomach, liver, and pancreas, aiming to unravel critical insights into tissue regeneration and pathology. Anthony Hyman, who has also been recognized as a Clarivate Citation Laureate earlier this year, discovered a fundamental mechanism of cellular organization mediated by phase separation of proteins and RNA into membraneless liquid droplets.

Analysts from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) at Clarivate recognized 6,868 individuals with 7,131 awards from more than 1,300 institutions in 60 countries and regions. The evaluation and selection process draws on data from the Web of Science Core Collection and uses quantitative metrics and qualitative analysis to identify individuals whose work has had a genuine, global influence on their fields.

Clarivite Press Release: https://clarivate.com/news/clarivate-announces-highly-cited-researchers-2025-list/

The field of biomolecular condensates has seen a sharp increase in the number of related research publications. To help organize this vast information, the CD-CODE database and encyclopedia was created in 2023 by the research group of Agnes Toth-Petroczy at the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) and at the Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD). The CrowDsourcing COndensate Database and Encyclopedia (CD-CODE.org) is a platform collecting knowledge on the biomolecular condensates based on experimental data, enhanced by a crowd-sourcing functionality to engage condensate experts.

Since first being published in 2023, CD-CODE has been very valuable in advancing research and has even been used to develop new tools predicting proteins that form condensates. Additionally, condensate protein components are now cross-referenced in the UniProt Protein Database and information in CD-CODE is linked to other databases to enhance its utility in research.

CD-CODE is an example of interdisciplinary collaborative teamwork between computational and experimental biologists and software engineers. With input from researchers of several groups at the MPI-CBG and the CSBD, such as from the group of Anthony Hyman and the Scientific Computing Facility at MPI-CBG, the researchers in the Toth-Petroczy group developed CD-CODE 2.0 together with Diana Mitrea from Dewpoint Therapeutics. This enhanced version expands the utility of CD-CODE 1.0 for biomedical research. The two lead authors, Ksenia Kuznetsova and Maxim Scheremetjew, explain, “New features such as data on nucleic acid condensate components, infectious condensates, condensate-regulating drugs, and disease-linked condensate abnormalities expand CD-CODE’s utility for biomedical research and hypothesis generation. We also addressed the usability of CD-CODE 2.0 with improved search capabilities, convenient programmatic access, and relationship-based architecture to enable interconnectivity across major biomedical databases.”

Agnes Toth-Petroczy concludes, “CD-CODE 2.0 will make it easier to use computational tools and data analysis to study biomolecular condensates. The upgrade will make CD-CODE a more useful tool for many different fields of science, such as biomedical research, and will help connect research on condensates to new treatments and therapies.”

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed new tools to get mechanistic insights into ether lipid biology. 

The research team used chemically modified ether lipids with two distinct reactive groups. Those so called bifunctional lipids allow to visualize ether lipid localization and study their interaction with proteins for the first time. 

A combination of fluorescence imaging, machine learning-assisted image analysis, and mathematical modelling revealed unique transport mechanisms of individual ether lipids.

“Using our new tools, we discovered that non-vesicular transport is the main mechanism for ether lipid transport,” explains Kristin Böhlig, who led the study. She continues, “However, some ether lipid types are transported faster than others, suggesting the presence of specific, so far undiscovered lipid transport proteins that can distinguish between ether lipid types.”

These results imply that the cellular lipid handling machinery is capable of identifying even small structural differences in ether lipids, adding to the evidence supporting the biological significance of lipid diversity.

“Our bifunctional ether lipid probes provide a flexible toolkit for studying ether lipid biology in detail. This will have significant benefits for understanding the functions of ether lipids in fundamental cell biology and their role in human diseases,” says André Nadler, who oversaw the study. “Studying ether lipids in mechanistic detail may in the future help to develop new treatments for diseases that are caused by imbalances in lipid metabolism.”

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See below for schedule.

“I knew that Heather Harrington, a director here at MPI-CBG, is building a community to connect math with biology. Since I deeply enjoy working with applications, I thought Dresden could be a good place to continue this work. And here I am, and I am excited to be here.” says Daniela Egas Santander.

Daniela did her bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering and mathematics at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Quito, Ecuador. She went to the University of Copenhagen afterwards for a master's and PhD in algebraic topology. She went to the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland for a postdoctoral fellowship in applied mathematics, focusing on applications to neuroscience at the laboratory of topology and neuroscience.  Afterwards, she continued working at the Blue Brain Project, which aimed to build biologically detailed brain simulations to deepen our understanding of brain function. As of October 1st, Daniela is a research group leader at the MPI-CBG and the CSBD.

Metabolism constantly maintains a flux of energy and matter that is vital to cells, so scientists speculated that thermodynamics imposes fundamental constraints on life's ability to sustain itself. Thermodynamics states that, first, energy can only change form, not be created or destroyed. Second, whenever energy is utilized, part of it must be wasted—degraded to a form that cannot be used anymore. This means that organisms must be careful: they need to expend energy to grow, but if they waste too much, they may be left without it. However, how organisms utilize energy to grow and how growth is constrained by thermodynamics remain largely unknown.

Researchers in the group of Jonathan Rodenfels at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, and in the group of Pablo Sartori at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine in Oeiras, Portugal, sought to understand how the laws of thermodynamics influence cellular growth. The team realized that a black-box type of approach might be the key to solving this problem. This approach—common in bioengineering—allows researchers to work with minimal information. It cannot describe how energy is processed inside the cell, but it enables us to calculate how much energy is wasted.

Tommaso Cossetto, the lead author of the study and a former postdoctoral researcher in the Rodenfels and Sartori groups, explains, “We applied this method to a large set of data from many different published studies and used it to quantify how much energy is dissipated or wasted by microbes as they grow. We then used nonequilibrium thermodynamics—a theory from physics—to analyze this data.”

Their study, published in Nature Communications, identifies two thermodynamic rules governing the growth and energy utilization of single-celled organisms, including archaea, bacteria, and yeast. Different types of microorganisms waste about the same amount of energy to grow a unit of biomass. This is the case whether they use oxygen, inorganic molecules, or fermentation as a metabolic strategy to grow. As a second rule, however, the team found that the use of oxygen requires more energy to produce biomass. This makes aerobic respiration, the process by which a cell uses oxygen to grow, a more efficient way for cells to grow than anaerobic respiration or fermentation, as the energy wasted is a smaller proportion of the energy required.

“Our two empirical rules constitute a long-sought-after connection between metabolism and thermodynamics,” say Jonathan Rodenfels and Pablo Sartori, who oversaw the study. “We found that there are fundamental limits to how cells can grow and function. Our findings are based on observations and data, but we don't yet understand the molecular and mechanistic reasons behind these limits. Further research will help us understand how cells work and how they can be improved or optimized.”

“Dresden has a very tight connection of experiments and theory, which made it a really attractive place for me,” says Fridtjof. “The Max Planck Society is a wonderful place to focus on science, and I think it's a real privilege to have that freedom. There are many research groups here that I would love to collaborate with in the future, and I'm really looking forward to exploring new research directions here.”

Fridtjof Brauns studied physics and theoretical and mathematical physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich. He also pursued his PhD at the LMU and went from there to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara for a postdoc with Boris Shraiman and Cristina Marchetti, where he focused on questions in development, cell- and tissue mechanics as well as active matter.

Proteins are the central molecules of life. Although the human genome codes for approx. 20,000 different proteins, there are countless variants of them. How this diversity comes about, how proteins take on their specific functions in the body – and what happens when errors occur during protein production – is investigated by Agnes Toth-Petroczy, using a novel interdisciplinary approach.

A particular focus of her research is on intrinsically disordered proteins, proteins that lack a fixed structure and therefore are difficult to analyze in conventional biochemistry. They account for up to 30 percent of the human proteome, and their function has been little understood. Moreover, she studies phenotypic mutations – errors during protein production in the cell (transcription and translation errors), which are not part of the genome. This is a broad field that has been little researched so far, but is of great importance for understanding the evolution of proteins and their role in various disease patterns.

Her current projects also analyze the collective organization of proteins into biomolecular condensates, little droplets within the cell where proteins interact with other proteins. Her research shows how such “meeting points” emerge, how they have changed in the process of evolution, and what role erroneous proteins could play in this process.

By developing innovative computer-based models and tools, she enables systems-biological investigations into previously difficult-to-access phenomena, with applications for both academic basic research to understand protein evolution and clinical applications.

“Agnes Toth-Petroczy is an exceptionally creative scientist who breaks new ground by using in-depth and innovative methodologies to reveal previously hidden dimensions of life at the molecular level,” said Max Löhning, Chairman of the Foundation Council of the Schering Stiftung, in recognition of the prize winner’s achievement.

By launching the Schering Young Investigator Award, the Schering Stiftung upgrades its tradition of promoting young talents for the 21st century. The award succeeds the Friedmund Neumann Prize and acknowledges the global nature of science. The 10,000-euro Young Investigator Award will be awarded on November 24, 2025, during a festive award ceremony at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

About the Award Winner

Agnes Toth-Petroczy studied chemistry at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, specializing in theory and computation and developing a special interest in intrinsically disordered proteins. She completed her PhD in life sciences in the lab of Prof. Dan Tawfik at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where she studied the principles of protein evolution. As recipient of an EMBO postdoctoral research fellowship, she joined the lab of Debora Marks at Harvard Medical School (USA) where she developed computer-based methods to predict the structures of disordered proteins. She subsequently switched to translational research and worked as instructor in medicine at the Division of Genetics of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, contributing to several novel gene-disease relationships. Since 2018, she has headed the “Protein plasticity and evolution” research group at the MPI-CBG and the CSBD. She is a member of the DFG-funded “Physics of Life” Cluster of Excellence at TU Dresden, an EMBO Young Investigator, and a recipient of an ERC Starting Grant.

Press Release of the Schering Stiftung

Lin, currently working on developing mathematical and machine-learning methods to understand complex biological datasets, came across the program through social media and was immediately intrigued. Particularly interested in the works of local mathematicians Heather Harrington and Ivo Sbalzarini, Lin has also had fruitful discussions with Anne Grapin-Botton and Michael Weber. Thomas had already visited the MPIPKS for the Fluid Physics of Life workshop in 2019 and realized the immense potential of the Dresden scientific community. He is currently developing theoretical models to determine how cellular geometry and intracellular transport are controlled and has had inspiring discussions with Pierre Haas, Christina Kurtzhaler, Heather Harrington, and Stephan Grill.

While both agree that the three months of this program may be quite short, Lin and Thomas are looking forward to building productive collaborations. “I think it is a good opportunity to extend my research field, especially since there is a great biology program here,” says Lin. Thomas adds, “I would encourage anyone with a biological problem involving geometry or mechanics to come and talk to me.”

The ELBE Visiting Faculty Program provides funded opportunities for researchers at different career stages. Visiting scientists closely interact with the CSBD and both Max Planck Institutes (MPI-CBG and MPIPKS). Through this program, the CSBD promotes networking between scientists and thereby fosters the community’s sharing of its research mission.

Anthony Hyman, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, is one of the 2025 Laureates in the field of chemistry, together with Clifford Brangwynne, director at the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute and professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Michael Rosen, chair of the Biophysics Department and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, USA. They are selected as Citation Laureates 2025 for their discoveries on the role of phase-separated biomolecular condensates in biochemical organization of the cell.

Since 2002, ISI analysts have used publication and citation data from the Web of Science Core Collection to identify potential Nobel Prize recipients. Out of 64 million articles and proceedings indexed since 1970, less than 0.02% have been cited more than 2,000 times. Citation Laureates are selected from this elite group through rigorous citation analysis and expert insight. Since the program’s inception, 83 Citation Laureates have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes, often years after their initial recognition by Clarivate.

Citation Laureates’ foundational research papers rank among the most highly cited in their fields, reflecting exceptional influence across disciplines and borders. This year’s Laureates have advanced knowledge in fields of urgent global relevance, including:

• Physiology or Medicine: Leukemia, appetite regulation, and immune system research
• Physics: Signal processing, quantum computing, interstellar chemistry, and image compression
• Chemistry: Energy storage, green chemistry, sustainable energy, and cell engineering
• Economics: Remote work, automation, inequality, poverty, and the economic impact of culture and discrimination

Congratulations to all 2025 Citation Laureates!

Press Release from Clarivate: https://clarivate.com/news/clarivate-unveils-citation-laureates-2025/

Light sheet microscopy opens new avenues to study biological processes with unprecedented imaging speed or full coverage of entire organs and organisms. However, researchers require advanced training to meet the technological and computational challenges of light sheet microscopy. The highly interdisciplinary course covered diverse aspects of light sheet microscopy, including sample preparation, microscope assembly, physics of the light sheet, long-term live imaging, image processing, high-performance computing, and IT challenges of big image data.

Commercial as well as homemade setups were made available for the students to get familiar with the various flavors of light sheet technology. The highlight of this year’s light sheet hardware line-up was the Flamingo Light Sheet system developed by a former MPI-CBG group leader, Jan Huisken.

From model species like zebrafish to Arabidopsis plants, the students unleashed the available light sheet systems on a wide range of samples. Throughout the course, all samples were imaged using light sheet technology, producing more than 80 terabytes of raw image data. Processing, visualizing, and analyzing this data was a large part of the course and often lasted until the early morning hours.

Shiheng Zhao and Pierre Haas from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPIPKS) and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), together with their experimental collaborators at Princeton University, USA, and the Flatiron Institute in New York, USA, have now developed a minimal mechanical model that explains the development of the hindgut of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as an example of this passive morphogenesis.

Through their combined experimental and theoretical approaches, they found that the complex shape changes of the hindgut primordium—a group of cells that gives rise to the hindgut of the fly—can arise from mechanical forces applied by the surrounding tissues.

Daniel Alber from Princeton University and one of the lead authors of the study says, “The tissue is deformed by the surrounding tissues through a process called ‘mechanical coupling,’ whereby the mechanical forces applied by the surrounding tissues are transmitted to the hindgut primordium, causing it to change shape. Our findings suggest that  its complex shape can be explained by simple mechanical principles, rather than complex genetic mechanisms.”

Shiheng Zhao, the other lead author, adds, “Pierre Haas and I created the minimal model that could calculate the mechanical forces and hence reproduce the deformation of the tissue not only in normal fly embryos, but also in different genetic perturbations.”

Pierre Haas and Stas Shvartsman summarize, “Our study has significant implications for understanding tissue morphogenesis and the development of organs and tissues in different organisms, by highlighting the role of inter-tissue mechanical couplings for the emergence of shape in development.  Future studies will aim to uncover the molecular and cellular mechanisms that control this passive morphogenesis and its implications for tissue development and disease.”