🚀We’re hiring! Join our international team at @ciid-heidelberg.bsky.social and @uniheidelberg.bsky.social
as a PhD Student or Postdoctoral Researcher to lead cutting edge research projects at the virus-host interface

Postdoc: tinyurl.com/d5sdhbnp

PhD: tinyurl.com/bdz5e5u6

Thanks a lot Marco!

Thanks a lot Stefan!

We’re gearing up to grow the Heidelberg team and will soon post several exciting positions. Stay tuned! 4/4

A huge thank you to my mentors, colleagues & friends, and especially my team - your hard work got us here. Also, many thanks to the broader virology community; it’s a privilege to contribute to such an amazing and dynamic field. 3/4

I’m excited to take on this new task and look forward to working alongside the incredible teams at the Center for Integrative Infectious Disease Research (@ciid-heidelberg.bsky.social) and across the Heidelberg Medical Campus. 2/4

Big personal news: Today I’ve started as Full Professor & Director of the Molecular Virology Department at Heidelberg University (@uniheidelberg.bsky.social). 1/4

The #HIRI & the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Würzburg jointly open a call for 3 HELMHOLTZ RESEARCH GROUPS WITH JUNIOR PROFESSORSHIPS (W1) in the areas of

🔹RNA-based Infection Research
🔹Microbial RNA Biology
🔹RNA-based Medicine

Apply by January 19 at www.helmholtz-hiri.de/en/w1-groups/

A daring email took @munschauerlab.bsky.social from Mannheim to New York, to the lab of one of the world’s most renowned #RNA researchers. 👨‍🔬🧬 Today, he is one of the most sought-after experts in the field. Learn more about him in this portrait by @www.helmholtz.de: www.helmholtz.de/en/newsroom/...

In conclusion, SHIFTR enables the systematic mapping of region-resolved RNA interactomes for any RNA in any cell type and has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of transcriptomes and their regulation.

Using SHIFTR, we identify interactions of the 5′ and 3′-terminal regions of authentic SARS-CoV-2 RNAs produced during infection and accurately recover known and novel RNA interactors.

SHIFTR works for RNAs of different length and abundance (snRNAs, lncRNAs, mRNAs) and is compatible with sequentially releasing interactomes for multiple target RNAs in a single experiment.

Proteins bound to a specific RNA can be released from interphase extracts by selectively degrading the RNA of interest, for instance with RNase H + specific DNA probes. Loss of the RNA leads to a SHIFT of crosslinked proteins to the organic phase in the next extraction step.

In brief, SHIFTR relies on the sequence-independent isolation of crosslinked RNA-protein complexes by organic phase separation as described in OOPS, XRNAX, or PTex.

With SHIFTR you can identify proteins directly bound to a specific region within any endogenous RNA. In addition to delivering region-resolution, SHIFTR requires orders of magnitude lower input material compared to the state-of-the-art, thus removing a critical bottleneck.

Time to SHIFT to BlueSky and share our recent paper introducing SHIFTR, a novel platform for region-specific RNA interactome discovery developed by PhD student Jens Aydin 👨‍🔬 in my group. Now published in Nucleic Acid Research: academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

Big shout-out to the lab members leading this effort @Helmholtz_HIRI @Helmholtz_HZI: Nora Schmidt, Sabina Ganskih, Yuanjie Wei and Alex Gabel. We are immensely grateful to our collaborators and funders @ERC_Research and the Helmholtz Association.

In brief, the host protein SND1 binds the negative-sense RNA intermediates of SARS-CoV-2 and promotes viral RNA synthesis through recruitment of NSP9, which acts as a protein primer for RNA production 🤯.

Hello BlueSky 👋. Time for our first paper alert 🚨: Thrilled to share the latest work from my group revealing how a host RNA-binding protein orchestrates SARS-CoV-2 RNA synthesis in human cells. Now out in Cell @CellPress: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...