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Projekt Druckansicht

GRK 1273:  Strategien menschlicher Krankheitserreger zur Etablierung akuter und chronischer Infektionen

Fachliche Zuordnung Mikrobiologie, Virologie und Immunologie
Förderung Förderung von 2006 bis 2015
Projektkennung Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 969236
 
Erstellungsjahr 2016

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

Infections by pathogenic bacteria and viruses remain among the most important causes of human mortality and death worldwide. The International Research Training Group IRTG 1273 was jointly established in 2006 by Hannover Medical School (MHH), the Helmholtz Institute for Infection Biology (HZI) and their Swedish partner institution, the Karolinska Institutet, a medical university with world-wide recognition in the field of infection research. The mission of IRTG 1273 was to provide young researchers with the opportunity to perform their Ph.D. thesis in the rapidly moving field of the infection biology of human microbial pathogens in a highly stimulating, competitive, international environment. The core element of the programme was a joint research programme centering on the question how human microbial pathogens achieve acute or persistent infection and how the host organism reacts to persistent infection. Rather than focussing on one selected aspect of infection biology, multiple thematic foci have been selected with the goal of exposing the graduate students to the wide spectrum of modern infectious disease research, and taking advantage of the full breadth of faculty competence available at the three institutions involved in this IRTG. A key element of the IRTG 1273 training strategy was a mobility phase where graduate students spent time in laboratories at the partner institutions. A total of 41 exchange visits took place during the reporting period, amounting to a combined length of 99 months. Since September 1, 2006, when the first seven graduate students started their projects, a total of 44 DFG-funded graduate students plus 18 non-funded graduate students were trained in IRTG 1273. At the time of this report, 30 of the DFG-funded graduate students have obtained a PhD or Dr. rer. nat. degree, the remaining graduate students are expected to complete their doctoral training until the end of 2017. From the start until the completion of this report (end of July 2016), the DFG-funded graduate students of the IRTG have published 150 scientific papers, of which 29 are jointly authored by German and Swedish scientists. These include publications in Blood, Cell Host Microbe, EMBO Mol. Med., Gastroenterology, Gut, J. BacterioL, J. Exp. Med., J. Immunol., J. Infect. Dis., J. Virol., MBio, Nat. Commun., Nat. Immunol., PLoS Pathogens, PNAS, Cell. Microbiol., and many other leading microbiology and immunology journals. The IRTG 1273 graduate students have made important progress in answering questions regarding the strategies that human pathogens use to establish and maintain infections in humans. Due to the breadth of the programme, only few examples can be highlighted in this Summary. Important discoveries included i) the demonstration of the impact of the gastrointestinal microbiota on the diversification of the IgA antibody repertoire in the gut, ii) elucidation of the mechanisms generating genetic diversity during chronic infection with the carcinogenic stomach pathogen, Helicobacter pylori, iii) identification of several novel important mechanisms used by humans to control infection with Hepatitis C virus, iv) role of natural killer cells in different bacterial and viral infections, such as hepatitis C, Streptococcus pneumoniae. Yersinia spp., Listeria monocytogenes, and others. The graduate students benefitted greatly from the complementary skills available in the German and Swedish groups. One particularly successful example were multiple collaborations between groups at the Karolinska Institutet with a focus on human and mouse natural killer cells and groups in Germany with expertise in specific infection systems. The collaboration of these groups and the exchange of graduate students helped to develop a research cluster studying the role of NK cells in diverse human infectious diseases that has been exceptionally productive, resulting in many high-impact publications. Overall, IRTG 1273 has been a major success that achieved all goals that the partner institutions had set forth at the beginning of the project. Many of the collaborations initiated as part of IRTG 1273 will continue past the end of the IRTG 1273 funding period, and many long-lasting scientific friendships have developed, both between graduate students of the three different generations and between faculty members.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

 
 

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