FMI 2022 Year in Review

2022 YEAR IN REVIEW

Cover:

“Molecular glue” (picture detail) by Georg Kempf — winning picture of the FMI Science Image Competition 2022

In 2022, as COVID restrictions eased, life at the FMI snapped back into pre-pandemic normality — a normality where our institute is buzzing and people are meeting in person, where scientific and social events play a prime role, and where visitors of all ages are welcome.

Over the past two years, we have learned that we can run meetings effectively in a virtual or hybrid format, but we missed the personal interactions that are so important for our personal and professional growth, and ultimately for our research. There is a resounding appreciation for the atmosphere of in-person scientific talks, extensive feedback opportunities and in-depth conversations during coffee breaks. That is why the FMI Annual Meeting, where we reviewed and discussed our research with 240 colleagues in Grindelwald for three days, has been a highlight this year.

The Annual Meeting was just one of many revitalizing events enabling continued focus on innovative and impactful science. Three of our research group leaders received prestigious prizes, our scientists continued to secure competitive grants and fellowships, and published over 100 studies, a few of which are highlighted in this brochure.

As we look ahead to 2023, we are excited about our key project: the move to Fab 24, a building located on the Novartis campus that is undergoing a complete remodelling. Despite challenges related to costs and supply chains, the construction works made great progress and we are confident that they will be completed in 2023. Our new building — modern, spacious and eco-friendly — will bring everyone under one roof and facilitate scientific exchange with our Novartis colleagues. I look forward to moving into this new home, where we will continue to advance biomedical research.

Dirk Schübeler FMI Director

Uncovered: neuronal mechanism behind motivation

Every day, we perform hundreds of actions with certain expectations in mind, and when those expectations aren’t met, we adapt our behavior. Working in mice, researchers in the group of Andreas Lüthi identified a neuronal mechanism that drives specific behaviors when the animals want to obtain a reward. The same mechanism also allows the mice to adapt their behavior when the reward is not the one expected. The findings could help to better understand conditions, including addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder, that are characterized by the inability to adapt one’s behaviors based on predictions.

Courtin,

Bitterman et al., Science

IMAGE: Mathias Mahn , FMI r

Familiar objects can prevent autism-like behaviors in mouse model

The emergence of autism traits can result from different factors, such as a person’s environment and genetic background. Researchers in the group of Pico Caroni and their Novartis collaborators showed that exposing mice with an autism mutation to a new environment can trigger autism-like behaviors through faulty signaling in the brain. However, adding familiar objects to the environment can rescue these defects, suggesting that behavioral therapies involving familiar features may help to prevent the emergence of autism traits in predisposed people.

Krüttner et al., Neuron

Monthly Happy Hours are back

After a forced break of two years due to COVID, the beloved FMI Happy Hours can finally brighten our Friday afternoons monthly again. Organized by two research groups and usually linked to a theme, Happy Hours are a great opportunity for people from various labs and roles to mingle and have fun together over drinks and nibbles.

Silvia Arber awarded Brain Prize 2022

Silvia Arber received the Brain Prize 2022, the world’s largest neuroscience prize, together with Ole Kiehn at the University of Copenhagen and Martyn Goulding at the Salk Institute. This year’s winners were recognized for their groundbreaking work on the neuronal cell types and circuits that control body movements in mammals. Their discoveries offer hope that science can eventually make breakthroughs in the treatment of life-threatening and debilitating diseases such as ALS, Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injury. The Brain Prize is awarded every year by the Lundbeck Foundation in Denmark.

Turning genes on: distance between a gene and

its regulatory region matters

When and where a gene is transcribed into an RNA molecule often depends on the gene’s physical interactions with distal regulatory regions called enhancers. Researchers in the group of Luca Giorgetti developed a novel experimental approach and combined it with mathematical models to investigate how such interactions control transcription. They found that the expression levels of a gene depend on the interaction frequencies with its enhancer. The findings shed light onto the role of chromosome structure in long-range transcriptional regulation.

Zuin, Roth et al., Nature

Nicolas Thomä receives Otto Naegeli Prize

Nicolas Thomä received the Otto Naegeli Prize for Medical Research, one of the most prestigious scientific awards in Switzerland, for his groundbreaking work on targeted protein degradation, contributing to advancing drug design. Thomä has shown how some small molecules function as “molecular glues”, inducing interactions between a target protein and an enzyme that tags proteins for degradation. Such molecular glues have the potential to target proteins that were previously thought to be undruggable. The Otto Naegeli Prize Award Ceremony was organized by the FMI and took place on June 14 at the Biozentrum in Basel.

IMAGE:

Thwarting cellular enzyme can fight viral infections

Researchers in the group of Patrick Matthias have identified a synthetic protein that dampens the activity of a cellular pathway involved in viral infection. The findings could help to develop drugs that combat viruses such as influenza and Zika.

Wang et al., Cell Reports

The FMI opens its doors to 200 high-school students

After a three-year break, the FMI participated again in the “Tage der Genforschung” (Days of Genetic Research), during which scientists present their research to visitors in a vivid and understandable way. More than 200 high-school students from northwestern Switzerland and neighboring regions in Germany learnt about molecular biology, carried out simple scientific experiments and chatted about the life of a researcher with FMI PhD students and postdocs.

Our flagship seminar series returns

We reintroduced the “Friedrich Miescher Lectures” — a series of seminars in which thought leaders in today’s biomedical science present their research to the FMI and Basel community. The goal is to stimulate the exchange of ideas and to foster the dialogue across disciplines relevant to our science. We had the pleasure of hosting Ben Lehner from CRG in Barcelona as our first guest speaker.

FMI mid-year Townhall at Sudhaus

FMIers enjoyed the opportunity to get together at “Sudhaus”, a popular bar and event location in Basel, and make up for the solitary time during the COVID pandemic. The event featured a midyear update by FMI director Dirk Schübeler, as well as an entertaining team-quiz, tasty food from food trucks and a fantastic singing performance. Most memorable was the karaoke session, joined wholeheartedly by many.

Andreas Lüthi receives an SNSF Advanced Grant

Andreas Lüthi was awarded an Advanced Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The SNSF transitional grant scheme is aimed at researchers who are barred from applying for an ERC Advanced Grant as Switzerland partially dropped out of the EU Horizon Europe funding scheme. Lüthi’s project aims to investigate how the brain controls emotional states.

EMBO Gold Medal for Prisca Liberali

Prisca Liberali is the recipient of this year’s Gold Medal of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), which is awarded annually to scientists under the age of 40 for outstanding contributions to the life sciences in Europe. Liberali was recognized for her “exceptional contributions to understanding the formation of intestinal organoids from stem cells and for developing new analytical tools.”

In-person interviews for PhD spring call

The FMI PhD and MD-PhD programs are the fundaments of our mission to train early-career scientists; students can apply twice a year, in spring and fall. The interviews for the 2022 spring call were held in person at the FMI to give applicants a chance to know the institute better and meet current students and postdocs.

Farewell Symposium for Susan Gasser

Initially planned for June 2020, the symposium in honor of Susan Gasser, former FMI director (2004–2019) and group leader, took place on July 1 at the Biozentrum in Basel. Entitled “Frontiers in Genome Biology” and featuring an exceptional line-up of speakers, the event celebrated Gasser’s outstanding scientific achievements, her successful leadership of the FMI and her longtime mentorship and support of women in science.

PhD retreat in Dijon

More than 40 students joined the FMI bi-annual PhD retreat, which this year took place in Dijon, France. Participants presented their work to peers, learned about startups, clinical research, communication and more, and did lots of fun activities, including hiking and wine tasting.

featured in Novartis Live. Magazine

The fall edition of the Novartis Live. Magazine, shared as a supplement of two local newspapers, was dedicated to collaborative science. In an article about the elements of scientific success, FMI director Dirk Schübeler talked about the environment required for researchers to succeed and expressed his concern over the exclusion of researchers in Switzerland from the coveted grants of the European Research Council. The Liberali group was featured in another article, and a photo of one of their custom-built microscopes made it to the magazine‘s cover.

FMI

FMI Annual Meeting

For the first time since the start of the COVID pandemic, the FMI Annual Meeting took place in its usual format — as a three-day meeting in the Swiss alps. Nearly 250 scientists from across the institute, a few colleagues from Novartis, as well as the members of the FMI Scientific Advisory Board, met in Grindelwald to discuss exciting science, network and have fun together. The program included talks by

postdocs and PhD students, a keynote lecture by Brenda Schulman from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, two poster sessions and an afternoon of recreational activities. The winners of this year’s FMI science prizes were recognized during the traditional gala dinner, which was followed by a night of follies.

Time to part: How to produce sex cells with the right number of chromosomes

FMI researchers have honed in on a key process that happens when yeast cells divide to form gametes, which are the equivalents of human sperm and egg. Their work suggests that proteins conserved from yeast to humans ensure the production of gametes with the right number of chromosomes — a finding that may help to understand conditions such as Down syndrome and certain cancers.

Kuzdere et al., EMBO Reports

The FMI hits TikTok

In the fall, the FMI posted its first video on TikTok, a social media platform that allows users to create, watch and share short videos shot on mobile phones or webcams.

Children get an insight into the world of science

Every year on “Nationaler Zukunftstag” (National Future Day), Swiss students aged 11 to 13 get a day off from school and are encouraged to visit a parent’s or a relative’s workplace to understand what their profession is about. The FMI organized an afternoon of educational and fun activities for our young visitors, who extracted DNA from onions and looked at squiggly worms, ‘immortal’ hydras and even their own cheek cells under the microscope.

TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its debut in 2014 and is now a top social media platform for teens and young adults across the world. The ubiquity of platforms such as TikTok help the FMI share science stories and news from the institute with an

even bigger audience. Follow us at www.tiktok.com/@fmiscience.

The FMI is also on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

FMI Alumni Scientific Symposium

For the first FMI Alumni Scientific Symposium, we invited four FMI alumni who went on to become group leaders to tell us about their exciting research and to meet with current postdocs to talk about careers.

New NIBR President Fiona Marshall visits the FMI

On her first trip to Basel as the new President of the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR), Fiona Marshall visited the FMI. In meetings with the director, researchers and group leaders, Marshall showed her enthusiasm about our work at the FMI and expressed her commitment to fundamental research. Marshall later said she was “impressed with the incredible science” conducted at the FMI and is keen on visiting Basel again soon.

Mighty proteins keep DNA regions close for longer

Researchers in the group of Luca Giorgetti showed that key proteins help to stabilize the interaction between otherwise highly dynamic DNA structures. The findings shed light onto how the complex folds that help to fit nearly two meters of DNA into the cell’s nucleus influence important biological processes.

Mach, Kos & all, Nature Genetics

Watch our video about the study

How chemical modifications on DNA keep genes off

Several diseases, including certain types of cancer and some neurodevelopmental conditions, have aberrant patterns of DNA methylation, a chemical modification that regulates gene expression in ways that keep genes in the ‘off’ position. Researchers in the group of Dirk Schübeler found that DNA methylation keeps genes silent mostly by inhibiting the binding of DNA by transcription factors — proteins that control how genes are expressed. The findings advance our understanding of how chemical modifications on DNA regulate gene expression.

Nature Genetics

Ho-Ho-Holiday Party

One of FMI’s longest-standing traditions is the end-of-year Holiday Party. In 2022, it took place in its full past glory, with FMIers, their partners and children getting together for a joyous celebration. The program included a year-end update by our director, a cake contest, a quiz, a clown show for kids and — in the second part of the evening — a cocktail bar and a DJ set that made the crowd dance until late.

Kaluscha, Domcke et al.,

‘Fab 24’, FMI’s new home, is taking shape

The FMI will move into a new, larger home on the Novartis Campus. The ongoing remodeling of a 1940s building will result in a modern and eco-friendly structure that can accommodate the whole FMI, including the animal facility. FMI’s new home will also feature a spacious cafeteria and several large meeting rooms on the ground floor. Despite challenges with sourcing materials, the construction works have progressed well this year. At this stage, furniture is installed in the labs. The planners’ goal is to complete the building and hand it over to the FMI toward the end of 2023. The move should start soon afterwards and take eight to 12 weeks.

Rear facade of Fab 24 in Nov. 2022

Above: Labs are starting to be equipped

FMI’s new look

We are refreshing the FMI’s look, and not just in anticipation of the move to our new home. A modern, versatile logo and font will form the basis of the FMI’s new visual identity across digital and print. The new logo features a sketch of a DNA molecule as a visual identifier, which makes it possible to leave out the subline “Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research” in the tiny avatars on social media platforms. The logo is purple and uses an open-source font that will become the official FMI font. The refreshed logo and brand visual identity will be implemented throughout 2023.

FMI Staff (December

1, 2022)

Visiting scientists and temp (25)

Undergraduates (12)

PhD students (81)

Postdoctoral fellows (74)

Research Groups

GENOME REGULATION

Marc Bühler

Jeffrey A. Chao

Guillaume Diss

Luca Giorgetti

Dirk Schübeler

Nicolas Thomä

Research group leaders (20)

Research technicians (39)

334

PEOPLE

of 42

NATIONALITES

Technical platforms associates (57)

Administration, building, services (26)

MULTICELLULAR SYSTEMS

Helge Großhans

Prisca Liberali

Patrick Matthias

Antoine H.F.M. Peters

Charisios Tsiairis

Margherita Yayoi Turco

NEUROBIOLOGY

Silvia Arber

Pico Caroni

Johannes Felsenberg

Rainer W. Friedrich

Georg Keller

Andreas Lüthi

Filippo Rijli

Friedemann Zenke

Awards, Grants and Fellowships 2022

STUDENTS & POSTDOCS

Lukas Anneser → EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship

Simon D’Aquin → FMI Ed Fischer Prize

Maria Sol Fustiñana and Yaël Bittermann → FMI Max Burger Prize

Nikolas Karalis → SNSF Ambizione Grant

Axel Laborieux → SNSF Swiss Postdoctoral Fellowship

Mathias Mahn → SNSF Ambizione Grant

Stephen Methot → SNSF Ambizione Grant

Alicia Michael → University of Basel Research Fund Junior Researchers

Iris Odstrcil → University of Basel Research Fund Junior Researchers

Franka Voigt → SNSF Prima Grant

Jessica Zuin → FMI Ruth Chiquet Prize

GROUP LEADERS

Prisca Liberali → EMBO Gold Medal

Andreas Lüthi → SNSF Advanced Grant

Filippo Rijli → Election to “Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei”

Nicolas Thomä → Otto Naegeli Prize

PhD Thesis presented in 2022

Leslie Bargsted (Rijli group)

→ A single cell approach to study transcriptional regulation of cortico-pontine connectivity during mouse brainstem development

Jessica Desogus (Chao group)

→ Dynamic association of human Ebp1 with the 80S ribosome

Jaroslav Ferenc (Tsiairis group)

→ Dynamics of tissue patterning in Hydra

Laura Gaspa Toneu (Peters group)

→ Dynamics of nucleosome occupancy in developing male germ cells and mature spermatozoa

Zuzanna Kozicka (Thomä group)

→ Molecular glue degraders of cyclin K

Tahsin Kuzdere (Bühler group)

→ Regulation of constitutive heterochromatin during fission yeast meiosis

Georgios Misailidis (Tsairis group)

→ Temporal dynamics in the mouse pre-somitic mesoderm

Nila Mönig (Friedrich group)

→ Neuronal organization of the olfactory bulb in adult zebrafish

Julia Nörpel (Chao group)

→ Characterization of C9orf72 function in autophagy and RNA metabolism

Aparna Pandey (Bühler)

→ Discovery of ChAHP2 complex

Carlos Pla Prats (Thomä group)

→ Recognition of the CCT5 di-Glu degron is incompatible with TRiC assembly

Marco Pregnolato (Schübeler group)

→ Mechanisms of transcription factor binding and cofactor activity in chromatin

Wuzhou Yang (Arber group)

→ Fine-grained structural and functional map for forelimb movement phases between cortex and medulla

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Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research

Maulbeerstrasse 66 4058 Basel Switzerland

Phone: +41 61 697 66 51

E-mail: office@fmi.ch