Research

Snakes benefited from the mass extinction after the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. The asteroid impact wiped out 95 percent of all life on Earth, including the dinosaurs, and only a few species of snake survived. The lack of predators and their ability to survive for long periods without food helped snakes to spread to other continents and exploit new habitats, allowing a wide variety of new species to develop. The patterns seen in snakes show that natural disasters play a greater role in evolution than previously thought.

The influence of rapid climate change on biodiversity depends to a significant extent on longer-lasting climate trends in previous periods of the Earth’s history.

Although patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can benefit from treatment that suppresses the virus and thus protects them against AIDS, they usually have more health problems than people not affected by the virus and their life expectancy is lower New studies indicate that increased and ongoing inflammation could be the cause.

From January 2022 onwards, the German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding a new research training group (RTG) at FAU and the University Hospital Erlangen which will investigate the impact of micro-milieu factors on the antimicrobial defense and survival of infectious agents in tissues. Why are m...

An international research team with participants from several universities including the FAU has proposed a standardized registry for artificial intelligence (AI) work in biomedicine to improve the reproducibility of results and create trust in the use of AI algorithms in biomedical research and, in the future, in everyday clinical practice.

After the Department of Ophthalmology at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen announced their global breakthrough in early July 2021 of successfully treating a Long COVID patient (aged 59), two further patients are now on the road to recovery thanks to the drug BC 007. The team at the Department of Ophthalmology has used the approach to treat two more patients.

A new collaborative research project involving FAU is working to cultivate communities of microorganisms in the laboratory. The aim is to develop a bioreactor which can simulate the natural living conditions for microbes. The BMBF has provided the project 2.5 million euros in funding.

The potassium channel KCNQ3 is required for our brain to generate accurate spatial maps. In mice, defects in KCNQ3 function have measurable effects on the internal navigation system. The findings of a research team including researchers from FAU recently published in Nature Communications are also relevant for Alzheimer's-type dementia research.

A FAU research team led by Prof. Dr. Christoph Becker has discovered that a messenger substance called prostaglandin E2 can protect epithelial cells from a special form of cell death, necroptosis. These findings offer a possible new treatment approach for ulcerative colitis and other chronic inflammatory bowel diseases.

In the life-threatening autoimmune disease, which mainly affects young women, the immune system attacks its own cells in different organ systems. A young woman has now been successfully treated with a new therapeutic approach at Universitätsklinkum Erlangen and she is now free of symptoms.