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Terpenes are natural products that are often very difficult to synthesize in the laboratory. Chemists around Professor Konrad Tiefenbacher from D-BSSE and the University of Basel have now developed a synthesis method that mimics nature. The decisive step takes place inside a molecular capsule, which enables the reaction. The findings were recently published in the Journal Nature Catalysis.

The head of the Bio-Engineering Laboratory was appointed guest professor for five years (2018-2023) in the Faculty of Engineering at Southeast University in Nanjing, China. The University is one of the national key universities, administered directly through the Central Government and the Ministry of Education of China.

ETH students developed a pocket microscope that fits to the camera of a smartphone. Lucas Armbrecht from the Bioanalytics Group of Professor Petra Dittrich now completed a test phase for mass usage and helped to improve the add-on’s software. µPeek simply connects to the phone via bluetooth and uses an App that is available for iOS and Android. Market entry is scheduled for next week. Read full article in 20 Minutes (in German).

The ETH Board appointed Professor Barbara Treutlein, currently Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, as Associate Professor of Quantitative Developmental Biology. She will start on this new position at D-BSSE as of 1 January 2019. D-BSSE Professor Sai Reddy completed his Tenure Track and was appointed Associate Professor of Systems and Synthetic Immunology.

The German chemical biologist in the Biotechnology and Bioengineering Group of Professor Fussenegger works on functional nucleic acid elements that act as regulators and sensors in gene expression. His expectations to find an interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial environment at D-BSSE are certainly met. Unexpected are the challenges posed by Swiss German dialects outside D-BSSE.

Once every year, in the midst of the summer, the small city of Lindau, Germany, turns into the centre of intellectual exchange. Dozens of Nobel laureates of a specified discipline are meeting up with hundreds of selected Young Scientists from all around the world. This year, the theme of the 68^th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting was Physiology or Medicine - and I was part of it.

Proton pumps in the membranes of cells power biochemical reactions within the cells. In their recent study published in Nature Communications Chemistry, researchers from the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University Basel together with colleagues around Professor Müller from D-BSSE and the NCCR Molecular Systems Engineering presented a synthetic biology approach. They used a light-driven proton pump as energy source in artificial membranes.