Press

The venom of a single spider can contain up to 3000 components. These components, mostly peptides, can be used to develop promising drug leads for the treatment of diseases. Spider venom can also be used as a biological pesticide. A team of scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME and the Justus Liebig University in Giessen is primarily researching the venoms of spiders native to Germany, which have mostly been neglected until now. Their results regarding the biology of the toxins, in particular from the venom of the wasp spider, have been published in the journals “Biomolecules” and “Biological Reviews”.

As part of the EU project "TRANSVAC2" (European vaccine research and development infrastructure), a cooperation for the promotion of European vaccine development projects, the Fraunhofer IME hosted two workshops in early November 2021 in Aachen, which was attended by 17 participants from 9 different nations.

An online survey had been conducted in the course of May - July 2021 to collect potential update needs and suggestions. The German Environment Agency contracted Fraunhofer ITEM, Fraunhofer IME and Ramboll for the survey. The joint efforts of all of you led to a total number of over 500 individual suggestions. We would like to express our sincerest thanks to you for this impressive feedback. In order to work towards a prioritisation of the update needs, we would like to share the reported suggestions with you asking you for a pre-evaluation of the general significance of an update need.

Dr. Carla Recker (Continental), Prof. Dr. Dirk Prüfer (University of Münster) and Dr. Christian Schulze Gronover (Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME) have been nominated for the Federal President's Award for Technology and Innovation 2021 (“Deutscher Zukunftspreis 2021”) with their joint project “Sustainable tires through dandelions – innovations from biology, technology and agriculture”. The German Federal President’s Office announced this today at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Every year, the Federal President presents the Federal President's Award to individuals or teams for outstanding technical, engineering, or scientific innovation.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Vilcinskas, head of the Branch for Bioresources, presents the research area of ​​insect biotechnology, which pursues the goal of developing organisms as biological resources for applications in medicine, crop protection and the food and feed industry.

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is currently mainly known for its role in Covid-19 vaccines, but RNAi can also have important non-medical uses, namely as a precisely targeted, environmentally friendly pesticide. In its article, the British magazine "The Economist" reports, among other aspects, on the development of methods for the application of RNA pesticides by the company GreenLight Biosciences, with which the Fraunhofer IME is collaborating.

Fraunhofer ITEM and IME contracted by Umweltbundesamt OECD Test Guidelines display an important tool to evaluate the impacts of chemicals on the environment. The update of the Test Guidelines is organised by the Working Party of National Coordinators for the OECD Test Guidelines Programme (WNT) and the OECD Secretariat.

Within the framework of a virtual meeting, Dr. Kwang-Zin Lee accepted the grant for the joint project "HOPE" of around 250,000 euros for the Bioresources Branch of the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME.

In a project funded by the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) and carried out by Fraunhofer IME, an advanced concept is applied to investigate the accumulation of substances in an exemplary freshwater food web. The general aim is to support the regulatory risk assessment of bioaccumulating chemicals. For this purpose, organisms were sampled from different trophic levels of Lake Templin, a part of the Havel River near Berlin.

Proteins are vital for life. At the same time, there is a protein shortage in the global food supply. Due to extreme weather conditions as a result of climate change as well as soil and water pollution caused by the use of pesticides and fertilizers, this shortage can increase in the future. One approach to tackle this challenge is to open up novel protein sources as a sustainable alternative for animal source foods suitable for the masses. In the lighthouse project “FutureProteins”, six Fraunhofer institutes develop new cultivation systems, which can produce nutritious proteins from selected plants, insects, fungi and algae.