Research

FAU astronomers investigate special star system before it explodes.

Repairing complex electrical appliances is time consuming and rarely cost-effective. Researchers at FAU have now developed a smart microparticle that enables defective components in these appliances to be identified more quickly and easily by using light signals., In the long-term, this could make repairs easier and extend the operating life of devices.

Ever since a team of researchers published an article in 2015 that seemed to prove that proteins continue to age during their entire lifetime without ever reaching a stationary state, this has been taken as fact by the scientific community. FAU researchers Igor Goychuk and Thorsten Pöschel have now discovered that their colleagues Hu et al. were mistaken in 2015.

HIPPROCATES aims to improve the diagnosis and treatment options available to patients with psoriatic arthritis and involves 26 partners from across Europe. FAU has a leading role in the project.

How can machines and autonomous transporters collaborate independently in a smart factory? This is the central topic covered by the new graduate programme ‘SeReCo’ at FAU, which is to be funded by the Franco-German University as of 1 January 2022. Research will focus on increasing the accessibility of online digital content for machines.

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research is to provide more than 2 million euros in funding for the research project ‘AGEnTS – Genetic Engineering of T-cells for Treating Infectious Diseases’ at FAU. The head of the project, which aims to combat drug-resistant pathogens using genetically modified immune cells, is Dr. Kilian Schober from the Institute of Microbiology – Clinical Microbiology, Immunology and Hygiene at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen.

A team of researchers at the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy at FAU has successfully solved the problem of finding a straightforward, cost-effective process for producing hexaarylbenzene molecules with six different aromatic rings. These molecules are important for a generation of new functional materials. The results have been published in the reputable journal Angewandte Chemie.

In 2020, FAU was awarded approximately 226 million euros in third-party funding. That is 15 million euros more than in 2019.

Using real-time deformability cytometry, researchers from the Max Planck Center for Physics and Medicine and FAU were able to prove for the first time that a Covid-19 infection causes significant changes in the size and stiffness of red and white blood cells, sometimes lasting several months.