At the annual meeting of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, as many as ten prizes were awarded to the best lecturers of the year, the best student teacher of the year, the Kjeld Marcker PhD Awards, the poster pitch prize and the poster prize.

Xavier Bofill De Ros is one of the seven talented researchers who will become a Lundbeckfonden fellow in 2022. And the grant that comes with the appointment enables him to establish his own research group and devote himself to research for the next five years at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics (MBG), Aarhus University.

Azadeh Shahsavar, who is assistant professor in Professor Poul Nissen's group at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Aarhus University, has received a grant to do research at the University of Copenhagen, where she will study the structure and function of proteins that transport glycine and glutamine in the brain.

Mammalian genomes have been colonised by transposable elements (TEs), so called ‘genetic parasites’, which occupy ~ 50% of genomic DNA and harbour the potential to propagate, resulting in genetic instability. These elements are therefore subjected to tight cellular control. Whilst our understanding of TE regulation has been dominated by transcriptional and epigenetic models, the role of post-transcriptional RNA decay regulation has until now been unexplored.

A group of PhD students from the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Aarhus University, has set out to make their department even greener. They have therefore set up a committee called greenMBG, which will come up with proposals for initiatives needed to realise their goals.

With a grant of DKK 50 M in the form of a Laureate Research Grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, Professor Daan van Aalten moves his research group from the University of Dundee to the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, AU, where he has been appointed professor and will be housed in the brand new laboratories in the University City from 1 June 2022.

Despite recent progress in predicting protein and RNA structure, we are still far from being able to design biomolecular structures that rival the complexity found in Nature. A new consortium, COFOLD, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, aims to elucidate the rules of RNA folding in order to design RNA molecules for applications in medicine and synthetic biology.

DANDRITE Group Leader Taro Kitazawa has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant of EUR 1.5 million from the European Research Council for research into the molecular basis of neuroplasticity to answer the fundamental questions regarding how memory is stored in the brain.

Associate Professor Kasper Røjkjær Andersen has been granted a Carlsberg Foundation Young Researcher Fellowship for three years to study the structure and function of receptors and calcium decoders at the Department of Molecularbiology and Genetics, Aarhus University.

Yuya Hayashi has been awarded DKK 10 million (EUR 1,3 million) from the Novo Nordisk Foundation over the next five years to start up his own research group at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Aarhus University. The aim of his research is to redefine our understanding of how life operates through cell-to-cell communication by studying extracellular vesicles, a poorly characterised family of messengers. He will use zebrafish as a model organism for visualisation of such biological processes and an RNA origami technology to manipulate the conversation between cells.