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?
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?
Moritz Gaidt
How does the innate immune system recognize pathogens and induce inflammation?
David Haselbach
How are molecular machines designed to fulfil their productive function? How is the failure of such machines prevented?
Wulf Haubensak
What is the neural basis of emotions and how do genes and drugs control them?
Anna Obenauf
What are the molecular mechanisms behind cancer? How can we exploit the vulnerabilities of cancer cells to find opportunities for new therapies?
Andrea Pauli
What are the molecular mechanisms that drive fertilisation and embryonic development?
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?
Joris van der Veeken
What are the mechanisms that direct T cell differentiation and function?
Johannes Zuber
Why are cancer cells immortal, what genes do they depend on, and how can we exploit cancer-specific vulnerabilities for cancer therapy?
Adjunct Investigators
Adjunct investigators are principal investigators who have moved with their labs from the IMP, but maintain and affiliated status for a certain period of time to support the transition.
David Keays
How do animals sense the earth’s magnetic field? and what genes are required to build a human brain?
Alipasha Vaziri
How can imaging technologies for the brain-wide recording and manipulation of neural activity be developed to understand how brain structure leads to function?
Manuel Zimmer
How do neural circuits in the brain compute information to produce behaviour?