Stephan Grill, research group leader at the MPI-CBG and the Max Planck Institute of the Physics of Complex Systems was awarded the BINDER Innovation Prize 2013. He will receive the award during the annual meeting of the German Society for Cell Biology in Heidelberg.
The Binder Innovation Prize was founded by BINDER GmbH in Tuttlingen, a leading manufacturer of environmental simulation chambers. It is awarded by the German Society for Cell Biology (DGZ). It is endowed with 4,000 Euros and was awarded the first time in 1998. The award is given for outstanding cell biological research with a focus on cell culture or the use of cell cultures.
Stephan Grill's research projects always bring physics into biology - or vice versa. His group is interested in the biological phenomenon of how polarity emerges in an embryo. Cell Polarity allows cells to orient along a geometric axis. A key step in this process is the segregation of two groups of highly conserved PAR polarity proteins, first discovered in the nematode C. elegans. Grill moved beyond trying to understand the detailed molecular activities of proteins, and instead focused on the physics of the problem, taking into account protein motion and the forces that certain proteins experience as they move through the embryo.