Press releases

A group of renowned scientists, nominated by academies through the European Commission’s Scientific Advice Mechanism, have advised Commissioners on the use of AI in science. Patrícia Martinková from the Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences was a member of the expert team.

A new biosafety laboratory BSL3 was opened today at the Biotechnology and Biomedicine Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Charles University in Vestec (BIOCEV), enabling safe work with highly infectious viruses and bacteria. This laboratory was built with funding from the EXCELES project of the National Institute of Virology and Bacteriology. The state-of-the-art facility costing nearly 65 million CZK will enable scientists to study, for example, hepatitis B, Rift Valley fever, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), as well as SARS-CoV-2. Studying the properties and life cycles of these and other viruses and studying their interaction with vectors will enable the identification of diagnostic and therapeutic targets.

Some molecules respond to external light pulses by changing their structure and holding certain states that can be switched from one to another. These are commonly referred to as photoswitches and usually have two possible states. Recently, however, scientists from IOCB Prague have developed a molecule that takes the possibilities of photoswitches a step further. The new molecule can be switched not between two, but between three distinct states. This gives it the ability to hold much more complex information in its molecular structure than has been possible so far. A paper on the topic, co-authored by PhD student Jakub Copko and Dr Tomáš Slanina, has now been published in the journal Chemical Communications.

The New Guinea region is known for being one of the most species-rich places in the world. Located north of Australia and south-east of Asia, New Guinea’s topographical complexity and geographic isolation has given rise to a huge diversity of life, much of it endemic. The island is home to at least 40 small mammal species found nowhere else on earth. However, small mammals in this region are not extensively monitored and we know little about their ranges, population statuses and threats.

Scientists found evidence that termites which lived millions of years ago engaged in the same mating behaviors described in their living relatives today. Approximately 40 million years ago two termites were in the middle of courtship behavior when they got entrapped by tree resin and preserved in fossilized amber. This so far oldest and only known fossil of an Electrotermes affinis termite pair gave researchers from the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) the unique chance to analyze the mating behavior of the extinct insects. Their findings were now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The oldest currently known human occupation of Europe lies near the town of Korolevo in western Ukraine. New findings by an international team led by Roman Garba from the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Institute of Archaeology of the CAS, Prague, have confirmed that the lowermost layer with the stone tools at Korolevo dates to 1.4 million years ago. Until now, the earliest inhabited location was thought to be Atapuerca in Spain, some 200,000 to 300,000 years later. The results, published today in Nature, also show that early hominins took advantage of warm interglacial periods to colonise Europe from the east or southeast. A recent advance in mathematical modelling combined with applied nuclear physics has enabled the precise dating of the Korolevo’s earliest occupation. The four-year long research project involved scientists from five countries and more than ten research institutions from around the world.

All animals undergo embryogenesis, the development of the embryo. Until recently, it was thought that the main goal of early embryogenesis was mainly to initiate developmental processes correctly. But an international team of scientists has found that in parasitic bitterling fish, the embryos already develop a set of important adaptations during this early stage that give them major survival advantages.

Controlling the chemical structure of matter at the atomic level with light seemed impossible until now. Now, scientists have developed a technique to control photochemical reactions at the level of individual molecules. An international team of researchers, including Tomáš Neuman from the Institute of Physics at CAS, has published a method for controlling molecular dynamics in Nature Nanotechnology. This breakthrough could open a new chapter in photochemistry research.

A breakthrough study, led by Czech scientists, has revealed how biological diversity originated in one of the world’s most significant biodiversity centres. The most extensive genetic study of African small insectivores, shrews, published in the Journal of Biogeography, unveiled secrets related to the origin, spreading patterns, and unusual diversification of mountain mammals in sub-Saharan Africa.

The decline of insect populations has attracted worldwide interest in times of global warming and changing environment, but we have only rudimentary knowledge about the biodiversity and abundance of insects in the high mountains in tropical regions. Even what nutrients limit insects in nature is still not well understood. This knowledge is important because of the increasingly frequent climatic extreme events that change the availability of food resources. An international team of scientists from six countries, led by researchers from the Biological Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), conducted a unique field experiment on three tropical high mountains, in some of the last virgin forests in the world. In this intercontinental work, scientists offered ants different food in order to find out, which nutrients these important insects prefer most in nature. The results, which among other things led to the discovery of more than a hundred undescribed species of ants, were published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography.