Two LMU research projects awarded with ERC grants

• The European Research Council awards Proof of Concept Grants to Silke Robatzek (Biology) and Tobias Staudigl (Psychology)
• The two researchers have received the funding to translate their results into practice
• The grants are worth up to 150,000 euros each

Geneticist Silke Robatzek and neuroscientist Tobias Staudigl are already being funded by the European Research Council (ERC) with an ERC Advanced Grant and Starting Grant respectively. The two researchers have now received a Proof of Concept Grant (PoC) for their projects to build on their work. With this funding, the ERC helps researchers translate their results into practice. The grant is worth around 150,000 euros.

New therapy against olive pest

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Silke Robatzek is Professor of Genetics and leads the Genetics of Plant-Microorganism Interaction research group at the Faculty of Biology.

The pathogen Xylella fastidiosa (Xf) causes bacterial leaf scorch, which affects valuable crops such as olives, grapevines, almonds, and blueberries. The disease is responsible for massive economic damage, especially in the Mediterranean region. A prominent example is the widespread loss of old olive groves in Southern Italy. Existing strategies for combating the disease have proven to be inadequate, and so we urgently need innovative new solutions. This is where Silke Robatzek comes in with her research project PROTaX (Designing a Novel Protein Inspired Therapeutic Against Xylella). The cell biologist and geneticist is pursuing a novel approach based on the hypothesis that the phytomicrobiomes of certain unaffected plants contain inhibiting factors against Xf. And in experiments, Robatzek was indeed able to identify a specific protein, and an active region within it, that inhibits the growth of the pathogen.

In the course of PROTaX, she now plans to further optimize this protein region and render it suitable for therapeutic application in agriculture. To do this, Robatzek will concentrate on the development of more effective protein fragments and test various forms of application. “Despite the major challenges that arise, the project has huge potential and is a promising alternative to conventional plant protection strategies,” says Robatzek. At the end of the project, the team plans not only to present a functioning protein fragment with proven effectiveness in plant models, but also to analyze market interest in order to lay the groundwork for subsequent application in practice.

Specific markers to improve deep brain stimulation

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Tobias Staudigl is Professor and PI, Research Group Cognitive Neuropsychology, Department of Psychology at LMU.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is used to treat neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. To date, DBS devices have been implanted in more than 300,000 patients worldwide. However, the efficacy of DBS therapy varies across patients, leaving a substantial number of patients without sufficient symptom alleviation. One of the major impeding obstacles is the difficulty to precisely localize DBS targets in individual patient brains. Despite research into alternatives, the need for optimizing target localization for DBS remains unmet.

The recent discovery of a hitherto unreported neural oscillation, enabled by my previous ERC Starting Grant DirectThalamus, is a promising solution to these challenges. The novel oscillation is spatially confined to the proximity of established DBS targets and could thus be used as a functional marker to improve localization and reduce non-responder rates. Funding from the ERC Proof of Concept Project optimizeDBS (Preclinical Development of Personalized Functional Markers for Deep Brain Stimulation) aims to support essential preclinical steps towards establishing a functional marker of DBS targets that is associated with superior clinical outcomes. Those include optimization of detection algorithms, exploration of alternative access routes to deep brain electrophysiology and evaluation of the functional marker in larger cohorts. The goal of the project is to finalize preclinical work and prepare the implementation and funding of a clinical trial to realize the approach in clinical routines. This may help to pave the way for the next generation neuromodulation: personalized DBS treatment.