There is no such thing as "the" Max Planck Institute. In fact, the Max Planck Society operates a number of research institutions in Germany as well as abroad. These Max Planck Institutes are independent and autonomous in the selection and conduct of their research pursuits. To this end, they have their own, internally managed budgets, which can be supplemented by third party project funds. The quality of the research carried out at the institutes must meet the Max Planck Society's excellence criteria. To ensure that this is the case, the institutes' research activities undergo regular quality reviews.
The Max Planck Institutes carry out basic research in the life sciences, natural sciences and the social and human sciences. It is thus almost impossible to allocate an individual institute to one single research field: conversely, it can be the case that different Max Planck Institutes carry out research in the same subject.
One of the most remarkable capacities of human beings is their ability to work together, to solve problems or to create things that no individual could have solved or created on its own. In current studies, researchers look at the early ontogeny of children’s abilities for collaboration and provide evidence that young children have species-unique skills and motivations of shared intentionality, including skills such as forming joint goals and joint attention with others, along with cooperative motives for helping others and sharing with others.
Our bodies are constantly under attack by hostile microorganisms, such as bacteria and viruses. Immune cells can identify foreign microbial components through a host of cell surface receptors. These receptors relay signals to the nucleus, where transcription factors activate the expression of genes whose protein products help fight the invaders. Misguidance of immune mechanisms can result in autoimmunity and leukemias or lymphomas. Researchers employ genetic mouse models to understand how signal transduction orchestrates immune responses and how its deregulation causes disease.
Much in the same way as we use shredders to destroy documents that are no longer useful or that contain potentially damaging information, cells use molecular machines to degrade unwanted or defective macromolecules. A key player in the degradation of RNAs is the exosome complex. Our work has revealed how the exosome binds and shreds RNAs by a channeling mechanism that is largely conserved in all kingdoms of life and that parallels the mechanism used by the proteasome to degrade polypeptides.
Researchers at the MPI for Molecular Biomedicine could define one of two possible routes as the major pathway for leukocytes that leave the blood system and enter into inflamed tissue. In addition, they could identify a switch that allows to open the passage through the blood vessel wall. These results could lead to the development of novel therapeutics to treat inflammation.
Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cells. They produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a “currency of energy” which is needed in all tissues. Damaged mitochondria or complexes that are producing the energy are known to be involved in different diseases and ageing symptoms. The mitochondrial genome is packed with additional factors in organisational units, the nucleoids. The presented data provide fundamental insights into the structure of nucleoids which in future might help to find new ways of handling mitochondrially inherited diseases.