New ERC Synergy Grants for LMU

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No fewer than three researchers from LMU are part of international research teams to have received a Synergy Grant, one of the most prestigious research awards given out by the European Research Council (ERC). The highly competitive grant supports pioneering projects that can only be accomplished through the interdisciplinary cooperation of two to four teams of researchers and lead to “advances at the frontiers of knowledge.” Funding of up to 14 million euros per project is awarded for a period of up to six years.

Chronobiologist Professor Martha Merrow from the Institute of Medical Psychology coordinates a trinational collaborative project on the internal clock of the bacterium Bacillus subtilis. This Synergy Grant is the first of its kind for the Faculty of Medicine at LMU. Researchers from the Faculty of Physics are involved in the other two Synergy Grants: Dieter Braun, Professor of System Biophysics, is part of a team investigating the molecular foundations of the origin of life. Meanwhile, astrophysicist Professor Kevin Heng has received the award as part of a team that is researching the physical and chemical characteristics of exoplanets.

The internal clock of bacteria

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Professor Emerita Martha Merrow was Director of the Institute of Medical Psychology at LMU until 2023. She currently leads the Molecular Chronobiology research group there. Merrow, one of the world's leading chronobiologists, is an expert in how circadian clocks regulate processes in microorganisms and higher life forms, all the way up to humans.

The science of chronobiology deals with biological timers, in this case the daily or circadian clock. Circadian clocks regulate much of the physiology and behavior of organisms across the spectrum, from simple to complex. Merrow's group has elucidated fundamental molecular and genetic mechanisms of how the circadian clock is regulated by microorganisms and higher organisms, including humans. Questions like and why someone is an early riser (lark) or a late riser (owl) are, for example, within her expertise.

In the ERC Synergy project ‘MicroClock’ (The Bacillus subtilis circadian clock: from molecules to mutualism) is funded with a total of 8.3 million euros over six years. Merrow's laboratory, together with partners in England (Professor Antony Dodd, John Innes Centre, Norwich) and the Netherlands (Professor Ákos T. Kovács, Leiden University), will investigate how the circadian clock works in a bacterium (Bacillus subtilis) and how this clock interacts with and influences it the internal clocks in plants and yeast. The project is the first Synergy Grant in the field of chronobiology. The clock in B. subtilis is primarily active when the bacteria form a multicellular complex called biofilm. This is relevant for both ecological and pathological situations. “The results of our work will therefore be of great importance beyond basic biology and could, for example, be of relevance for the timing of antibiotic administration in patients or for the optimization of clinical conditions mediated by the microbiome”, says Merrow, who leads the project.

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Origin of life in heated gas bubbles

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Dieter Braun is Professor of Systems Biophysics at LMU and a member of the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster and spokesperson of the CRC “Molecular evolution in prebiotic environments”. His research investigates the molecular foundations of the origin of life.

It remains one of mankind's greatest mysteries, for which there are no clear scientific answers: the origin of life. What conditions had to exist on the young Earth for molecules to join together and to form the precursors of organic life and herald the beginning of biological evolution?

BubbleLife (From RNA-peptide coevolution to cellular life at heated air bubbles) aims to find answer to this fundamental question. Together with Professor Hannes Mutschler from the Technical University of Dortmund (speaker), Dieter Braun is leading the new project, which is being funded with 6 million euros over six years. “We’re an interdisciplinary team from the fields of chemistry, physics, and biochemistry, and we’ve collaborated very successfully in the past,” says the physicist.

Previous experiments have shown that one factor could have played a decisive role in the early development of life: gas bubbles that are heated up on one side. Water evaporates from their surface and sucks in molecules. These conditions are ideal for an evolutionary process in which the right molecules interact to form cell-like structures. Self-sustaining replication networks could thus have formed for the first time from individual RNA building blocks. At the same time, amino acids could have polymerized to form the first peptides, while lipids formed membrane vesicles that encapsulated these precursors of transcription and translation.

BubbleLife plans to combine these hypotheses and test them experimentally. “We are retracing the path from the Darwinian evolution of RNA and peptides to the origin of the first cells,” explains Braun. Although this presumably took millions of years to happen, the experiments to simulate the process in test tubes will take a few weeks. “Our goal is to simulate all this in a consistent environment with a small selection of initial molecules.” If all goes well, the team's interdisciplinary work will eventually lead to synthetically produced "protocell generators" that feed and encapsulate both primitive RNA replicators and modern systems of transcription and translation. “BubbleLife will hopefully fundamentally change our understanding of the origin of life on Earth – and possibly elsewhere in the universe,” says Dieter Braun.

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Properties of rocky planets

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Prof. Kevin Heng is Chair Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics of Extrasolar Planets at LMU and a member of the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster. Born in Singapore in 1978, he studied astrophysics in Colorado before moving to the legendary Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. After that, he was director of the Center for Space and Habitability at the University of Bern until he came to LMU in 2022.

Just in our galaxy alone, there are thought to be billions of rocky planets orbiting Sun-like stars. To understand rocky exoplanets, however, we lack information about their atmospheres, about the chemical elements of which they are composed, and about the geodynamic processes on their surface and in their interiors. To allow these questions to be addressed in a more comprehensive fashion, the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded an ERC Synergy Grant funded with 10 million euros over six years to LMU astrophysicist Kevin Heng together with colleagues Prof. Stephen Mojzsis (spokesperson, HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences) and Prof. Fabrice Gaillard (CNRS Orleans) for their project GEOASTRONOMY (Exploring the chemical foundations for rocky exoplanets around Sun-like stars).

The three research teams plan to use astrophysical and geoscientific principles, combining astronomical data analysis with planetary geochemistry, experimental petrology, and atmospheric physics/chemistry. Unlike previous approaches, the novel idea here is not to start by theoretically modeling such systems, but to decode the geological history of an exoplanet through spectroscopic observations of its atmosphere.

To ensure that the advantages of remotely observing such atmospheres with next-generation telescopes can be exploited, the research groups want to understand how and why exoplanets developed their physical and chemical properties. Their work will concentrate on three categories of exoplanet that orbit Sun-like stars: sub-Neptunes (exoplanets smaller than Neptune), super-Earths (exoplanets somewhat larger than Earth), and ultra-short period (USP) exoplanets, which could contain magma oceans and atmospheres. Datasets from sources such as the James Webb Space Telescope are already furnishing clues that these three categories each have their own specific kinds of atmospheres. “Our goal is to create the chemical foundations for understanding the atmospheres of these three types of rocky exoplanets and make our findings available to the exoplanet community,” says Kevin Heng.

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