Research at the IMP is driven by scientific curiosity. Research questions are chosen by each principal investigator and the entire institute works towards supporting the labs’ search for answers. Below, you can find a short summary of the most burning questions that fuel our passion for science and our dedication to research.
Francisco Balzarotti

How can light-based methods provide maximal information on biological processes?
Starting in January 2020.
Meinrad Busslinger

How do transcription factors control the development of B cells and plasma cells?
Tim Clausen

How does the structure of chaperones and proteases that control protein quality relate to their function, and how could this be used to tackle disease and antibiotic resistance?
Luisa Cochella

How are the many different cell types that form a multicellular animal specified during development?
David Haselbach

How are molecular machines designed to fulfil their productive function? How is the failure of such machines prevented?
David Keays

How do animals sense the earth’s magnetic field? and what genes are required to build a human brain?
Anna Obenauf

What are the molecular mechanisms behind cancer? How can we exploit the vulnerabilities of cancer cells to find opportunities for new therapies?
Rushad Pavri

How do B cells control targeted mutation in the antibody genes to generate a vast repertoire of high-affinity antibodies?
Jan-Michael Peters

How can one cell divide into two identical daughter cells in a way that ensures the genome is precisely copied and partitioned?
Clemens Plaschka

How is mRNA processing regulated, and how do these mechanisms work in atomic detail?
Alexander Stark

How is gene regulation and therefore the development of our bodies encoded in our DNA sequence?
Elly Tanaka

What gives a stem cell its ability to regenerate into a whole limb, and why is that ability lost in mammals?
Johannes Zuber

Why are cancer cells immortal, what genes do they depend on, and how can we exploit cancer-specific vulnerabilities for cancer therapy?