Press

A collaborative study between researchers from the Fraunhofer IME and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research has shown how a single metabolite can render bacteria toxic to plants under high salt conditions. Their findings may have important implications for agriculture and plant health in changing climates.

In October 2023, the EU project "SUNGATE" commenced under the coordination of the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME and in collaboration with 11 partners from research and industry. SUNGATE aims to engineer a novel, circular, sustainable and cost-efficient bio-hybrid technology to achieve the highly-efficient and scalable production of solar fuels in systems ranging from portable temporary installations to larger-scale solutions.

The successor project to "Aspirant" - "Perspective" - started at the beginning of February. The research and development project made it through the second phase of the initiative "Tailor-made biobased ingredients for a competitive bioeconomy" of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Based on the success of the first phase "Aspirant", in "Perspective" the network is intensifying its focus on the production and application of triterpenes.

Inflammation research is becoming more ethical and economical: caterpillars help to understand gut inflammation and enable the faster and more efficient development of new therapies.

In the crowdfunding competition 2022 "ScienceForGood" of the Fraunhofer Future Foundation, the motto is "On your marks, get set, go!". Six research teams compete together with their heartfelt projects. From October 6, to November 30, 2022, the scientists from the participating Fraunhofer institutes have time to convince as many people as possible of their idea and reach their funding goal. The Fraunhofer Future Foundation supports this commitment with cofunding and prize money. The decision on this is up to civil society.

Insects devour a third of the world’s harvests each year. How can we fight these pests without endangering the huge numbers of useful insects? Fraunhofer IME has imitated one of nature’s clever tricks to protect plants in an environmentally friendly way.

Synthetic rubber has been produced and constantly optimized since the beginning of the 20th century. Nevertheless, its mechanical properties cannot compete with those of natural rubber. Natural rubber, for example, is characterized by an unprecedented strain-induced crystallization. In the research project "BISYKA", a team of Fraunhofer researchers succeeded in identifying relevant causes and successfully transferring them to synthetic rubber. At the German Rubber Conference in Nuremberg from June 27 to 30, the team will present how they managed to reduce abrasion without the tires losing their grip or low rolling resistance.

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.