Press releases

The prestigious HR Excellence in Research Award is granted by the European Commission to institutions that have demonstrated excellence in human resources management and support for researchers. The Institute of Microbiology of the CAS has recently received this award.

An international team of scientists from the Faculty of Science at Charles University, the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Stanford University has uncovered the molecular mechanisms by which cell surface sugars influence the navigation of neurons in the nervous system. Their results were published in the prestigious journal PNAS. 

Czech scientists are the first in the world to have imaged an entire chromosome in its native state. Thanks to a new revolutionary imaging method, researchers from the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with the Institute of Experimental Botany of the CAS, achieved what experts from leading laboratories all over the world have been striving for. Revealing the structure of the chromosome surface, consisting of protrusions and chromatin fibers spatially organized in loops, has potential implications for fields like medicine and agriculture. The new imaging method heralds significant improvements in electron microscopy for the scientific community.

The InSight mission of NASA has shown that Mars is still seismically active. The search for recent traces of tectonic activity in Tharsis (the largest volcano-tectonic province on Mars) needs to be done  by using remote sensing datasets that enables the identification of surface deformations possibly associated with the formation of marsquakes. A new study published in Icarus, has now revealed evidence of very recent faulting in Tharsis, confirming that Mars is not a tectonically dead planet.

Scientists from Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences identified new mechanisms of DNA repair in human cells. They found that RAD18 protein controls the choice of specific pathways used for repair of the DNA breaks and prevent development of genome instability that is one of the hallmarks of cancer. These new findings have recently been published in Nucleic Acids Research journal.

Technology from the laboratories of IOCB Prague has been given an extraordinary opportunity to succeed in the rapidly developing segment of gene therapy. The results of successful research are set to be advanced by a newly established private company called Adalid Sciences, which is being supported with a major investment from BTL Group, a leading manufacturer of medical technologies.

Vojtěch Brlík from the Department of Ecology, Faculty of Science, Charles University and the Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Czech Academy of Sciences calls on scientists to share basic information about biological samples (metadata) to ensure their effective repurposing across biological disciplines. The call to the scientific community, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, is based on the experience gained from coordinating the AviSample Network metadata repository, which currently holds the metadata of more than 35,000 samples of almost 500 bird species.

Julius Lukeš of the Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, CAS, was elected among international members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States. The NAS is a private nongovernmental institution to advise the nation on issues related to science and technology. This year´s elected 120 members and 24 international members bring the total number of active members to 2,617 and the total number of international members to 537.

Dr Petr Cígler and his collaborators are working on refining molecular systems for transporting ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules into cells. The question of how to effectively deliver RNA to a designated place in the body in order to silence a malfunctioning gene is one of the greatest challenges of the rapidly developing field of gene medicine. Now, researchers from IOCB Prague have taken yet another significant step towards achieving this goal. They have described in detail the preparation of a novel composite vector nanomaterial for transporting RNA, in which they focused mainly on ensuring its non-toxicity to cells. The reason is that the harmfulness of hitherto known nucleic acid vectors presents a serious obstacle to the expansion of gene therapy. A new article on the topic has now been published in the scientific journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The highest energy cosmic ray particles are likely to penetrate much deeper into the atmosphere than previously thought. The incoming particles are therefore likely to be much heavier. New and fundamental insights emerge from a method that generalises the approach to predicting models of cosmic particle collisions with the Earth's atmosphere. The accuracy of Jakub Vícha's method has been confirmed by hundreds of international scientists at the Pierre Auger Observatory, as shown in a study published these days in Physical Review D.