13 Signals for 2014

At BIOSS Centre for Biological Signalling Studies we researched on, sent out and received lots of signals in 2013. As we look back on 2013, we set the bearings for another excellent year of signaling research in 2014.

1. At the time of the #Aufschrei discussion about gender equality in Germany in January BIOSS searched for an excellent female signaling researcher to be awarded the Barbara-Hobom Preis. We found two!
2. After the crash of the unexpected meteor in Tscheljabinsk in February everyone looked up at the sky. At BIOSS we looked for unexpected small things at a microscopy symposium.
3. White smoke was sent out at the Vatican and the heads of fifth graders were smoking on the Girl’s day.
4. A flood buried northern Germany in spring 2013. BIOSS researchers flooded the scientific community with more than 170 papers in scientific journals in 2013.
5. While the USA was searching for Edward Snowden, in July 2013 visitors hunted for proteins on the Münsterplatz in Freiburg at the Wissenschaftsmarkt.
6. BIOSS’s scientific director Michael Reth illustrated the size of proteins with the example of the City of New York and the city of New York elected a new Mayor in 2013.
7. Education was an important topic in the election campaign in Germany 2013. At BIOSS we supported gifted pupils.
8. The Freiburg iGEM team 2013, supported by BIOSS, built a tool to pilot the regulation of specific genes and China piloted a spaceship to the moon.
9. Merkels mobile phone was monitored and Tom22 monitors the entry of the mitochondrium.
10. The Nobel prize went to research on vesicles and the BIOSS vesicles researcher Winfried Römer gets funding by the Juniorprofessuren Programm Baden Württenberg.
11. In fall BIOSS researchers met to discuss new developments in research on membrane organization at the Schluchsee, in the middle of the Schwarzwald. In a lake in the middle of Antarctica, Lake Vostok, researchers found new bacteria in 2013.
12. BIOSS researcher Wilfried Weber was voted one of the top 40 young scientists by the World Economic Forum and it took the German elected politicians more than 40 days to decide on a coalition to build a government.
13. Let’s see in 2014 if the SPD and the CDU work as well as a team, as TOM and SAM at the mitochondria or all the researchers at BIOSS.