A new Max Planck Center is to be established in Japan

The Max Planck Society has decided to team up with RIKEN, the Japanese research institute, to establish a RIKEN – Max Planck – Joint Research Center for Systems Chemical Biology. The two research institutions are thereby creating a platform where they can pool knowledge, experience and infrastructure, as well as new methods and technologies.

“The foundation of the RIKEN-Max Planck Center raises the cooperation between our two organisations to a new level that corresponds to the intensity and scope of our 25-year collaboration,” says Max Planck President Professor Peter Gruss. “It is good to know that in RIKEN will have a trusted, reliable and scientifically highly-competent partner in Japan. I can see an exciting future for the cooperation in the field of systems chemical biology, where each side can contribute its strengths for the benefit and success of both.”

Professor Ryoji Noyori, President of RIKEN, holds a similar view: “It is a great honor to establish a joint research center with the world-famous Max Planck Society. I am pleased that our two organizations, and two countries, have joined forces in this way just when we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Japan-Germany relations. Japan has just experienced the worst natural disaster in its history, but even as we work to rebuild, we must ensure that nothing obstructs the progress of science and technology. I am hopeful that this agreement will further the advancement of science and technology, promote international cooperation, and foster the development of the next generation of scientists.”

The founding team of the new Center comprises four top scientists, two Max Planck Directors, Herbert Waldmann and Peter Seeberger, and two researchers from the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute (RIKEN ASI), Hiroyuki Osada and Naoyuki Taniguchi. The aim is to promote exchange among experts and to support junior scientists. Two new International Max Planck Research Schools (IMPRS), where talented young scientists pursue a structured doctoral programme, are to be integrated into the Center’s research. In addition, there will be a regular exchange of scientists and doctoral students, possibilities for internships, and symposia to promote the communication among scientists.

A great many new technologies which are not normally available at a research organisation will be employed to enable comprehensive research in the field of systems chemical biology to be undertaken. Several research institutes have developed special expertise in certain research fields and technologies, yet always require cooperation partners with supplementary expertise.

The RIKEN Advanced Science Institute, located in Wako north of Tokyo, the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund and the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam each have high-achieving departments in the field of chemical biology. This joining of forces in a joint research group creates a unit that will enable comprehensive research work to be undertaken.

Hiroyuki Osada’s group at RIKEN ASI is particularly successful in the isolation and characterisation of natural substances and their use in chemical biology. The group succeeded in creating a powerful proteomics platform that makes it possible to identify chemical points of attack on proteins. The technology to isolate powerful, small molecules of natural substances is currently not available at any Max Planck institute.

Herbert Waldmann’s department at the Max Planck Institute in Dortmund has extensive knowledge and experience in the design and synthesis of substance compounds that are derived from natural substances, their use in biochemical and cell-based tests, and the identification of their biological target molecules. The group has a collection of around 10,000 drug-like molecules which are derived from and inspired by natural substances. This collection is to be expanded in the future to more than 100,000 substances and investigated in biological screenings which RIKEN ASI and the Max Planck Society will carry out. This opens up new possibilities for the partner organisations. The substances can be investigated in parallel and extremely efficiently in high-throughput experiments to ascertain if they contain any of a large number of target proteins or reaction networks of interest. The benefit would not be limited solely to basic research. The work will make a great contribution to transferring the results of research into medical applications in order to provide completely new and promising therapeutic approaches.

System glycobiology deals with the structure, synthesis and biology of sugar chains which influence many biological processes. This research field promises, among other things, an improved understanding of diseases, and new means of diagnosis and therapy, such as the development of vaccines against malaria or hospital germs. A renowned expert in this field is Peter Seeberger of the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam. Nowhere in the world except in Potsdam does one institution combine the collection of compounds and of technologies which are necessary for system glycobiology such as automated synthesis, carbohydrate microarrays, sequencing and bioinformatics and structural biology.

The group headed by Naoyuki Taniguchi’s at RIKEN ASI specializes in the field of glycomics in the treatment of diseases and has gained a strong position in glyco-metabolomics and structural microbiology. The group has a great deal of experience in areas that have not yet been developed in Seeberger’s department, in particular in the animal models and structural glycobiology. While Seeberger’s group contributes defined oligosaccharides and resultant tools such as glycan arrays, the Taniguchi team is expert in the field of glycomics for the treatment of diseases. The Max Planck technologies are the key for the applied medical research being undertaken in Japan. Merging the two research activities will make it possible to create a dove-tailed specialist group that can use the advantages of fundamental techniques in the research of disease-related issues.

The RIKEN - Max Planck – Joint Research Center for Systems Chemical Biology is the sixth Max Planck Center which the Max Planck Society has established with a partner abroad.