In April, two fellows were awarded ERC Advanced Grants of up to 3.5 million euros for a ground-breaking, high-risk project. Andreas Mayer will study a novel pathway for intracellular phosphate reception and signalling and explore the role played by acidocalcisomes in it. He hopes to identify key functions of these poorly understood organelles. Zoltan Nusser will receive 2.5 million euros over the course of five years for his project “Proteomic Fingerprinting of Functionally Characterized Single Synapses”. His aim is to test whether the large functional diversity of chemical synapses of otherwise homogeneous nerve cells is indeed caused by quantitative molecular differences.

Professor Andreas Mayer, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, Fellowship: 1993–1995

Professor Zoltan Nusser, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Postdoc-Fellowship: 2000–2006