Research

How does the immune system manage to fight invasive pathogens without damaging the body? And why does it sometimes turn against the body after all? A team from the Chair of Genetics at FAU has been exploring these questions together with the university hospitals in Erlangen and Regensburg.

Several studies conducted by the team of researchers led by Prof. Dr. Mario Zaiss, Professorship of Immune Tolerance and Autoimmunity, suggest that a high-fibre diet can help to treat arthritis and even prevent the autoimmune disease to a certain extent.

Researchers from FAU, the University of Bristol and the University of Nottingham (UK) have developed a new procedure which allows fat residues to be analysed better than ever before in vessels that are thousands of years old. Mass spectrometry imaging can be used to determine the distribution and concentration of lipids, without having to destroy the ceramics in the process.

At the current time, almost 80 million people throughout the world are fleeing violence, catastrophes, conflicts, wars and persecution. For several years now, refugees and migration have been one of the major topics of our times. Many of the questions raised are now being dealt with in a collaborative project on migration and refugee research launched at the Centre for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg (CHREN) at FAU.

The wave of forced migration in 2015 and 2016 has changed integration politics in towns, administrative districts and municipalities in Germany forever. As a consequence, local integration management has been set up in several municipalities or existing structures have been expanded. At the same time, funding for integration policy measures is often not secure.

A team of researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has now investigated changes to the area and height of all glaciers in the European Alps over a 14 year period in their recent study. The result: approximately 17 percent of the entire volume of the ice has been lost since the start of the new millennium. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Explosions from stars, so-called supernovas, can shed some light onto the research into dark matter. This has been shown by a study carried out by team of German and Slovenian researchers at FAU and the University of Nova Gorica.

After 182 days, the x-ray telescope eROSITA on board the Spectrum-X-Gamma space probe has completed its first complete survey of the sky. The new map of the hot, energetic universe includes more than one million objects. Researchers at FAU are strongly involved in the project.