Congenital muscular dystrophy is a rare hereditary disease which cannot be cured. The more than 30 known forms of this neuromuscular disease differ in the type of genetic defect and in the severity of disease progression.…

Chromosomes in 3D The developmentally dynamic nucleus How are chromosomes organized within nuclei? And how does organization impact developmental events? The nucleus is very dynamic during embryogenesis, in part because…

Childhood dream: Becoming a scientist June 2025 Since she was a child, Ina Sonnen dreamed of becoming a cancer researcher. Although her academic career took a slightly different path, the topic of cancer has never quite left…

Starting on April 15, 2026 or as per agreement The Biozentrum of the University of Basel is one of the world’s leading life sciences institutes. With 32 groups and 500 employees, we are a dynamic and international research…

In times of “home office”, lock downs and closed gyms, endurance sports is back in trend again. Jogging, biking or swimming keeps you healthy and makes your muscles fit. With regular training, the musculature adapts to be…

In the past years, AlphaFold has revolutionised protein science. This Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool was trained on protein data collected by life scientists for over 50 years, and is able to predict the 3D shape of…

When someone is confronted with ‘foreign’ material, be it viruses, bacteria, fungi, but also donor organs following transplantation, immune cells called T cells come into action to inactivate and destroy the ”foreign”…

On a peace mission: From NBC protection to arms control May 2020 Whether anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, Hanta or coronaviruses – none of these are exotic to the Biozentrum alumnus Max Brackmann. He works as a postdoc at the Spiez…

Interview with Chris Peyer At first he was surprised. He had imagined that studying biology would be different. It not only deals with the human being. On the contrary, it is exactly the broad range of fields, which he now…

Physical mechanisms in bacterial multicellular development Bacterial communities Bacterial biofilms are surface-associated assemblages of bacterial cells that are now considered to be the most abundant form of microbial life…