Press releases

Technology from the laboratories of IOCB Prague has been given an extraordinary opportunity to succeed in the rapidly developing segment of gene therapy. The results of successful research are set to be advanced by a newly established private company called Adalid Sciences, which is being supported with a major investment from BTL Group, a leading manufacturer of medical technologies.

Vojtěch Brlík from the Department of Ecology, Faculty of Science, Charles University and the Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Czech Academy of Sciences calls on scientists to share basic information about biological samples (metadata) to ensure their effective repurposing across biological disciplines. The call to the scientific community, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, is based on the experience gained from coordinating the AviSample Network metadata repository, which currently holds the metadata of more than 35,000 samples of almost 500 bird species.

Julius Lukeš of the Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, CAS, was elected among international members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States. The NAS is a private nongovernmental institution to advise the nation on issues related to science and technology. This year´s elected 120 members and 24 international members bring the total number of active members to 2,617 and the total number of international members to 537.

Dr Petr Cígler and his collaborators are working on refining molecular systems for transporting ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules into cells. The question of how to effectively deliver RNA to a designated place in the body in order to silence a malfunctioning gene is one of the greatest challenges of the rapidly developing field of gene medicine. Now, researchers from IOCB Prague have taken yet another significant step towards achieving this goal. They have described in detail the preparation of a novel composite vector nanomaterial for transporting RNA, in which they focused mainly on ensuring its non-toxicity to cells. The reason is that the harmfulness of hitherto known nucleic acid vectors presents a serious obstacle to the expansion of gene therapy. A new article on the topic has now been published in the scientific journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The highest energy cosmic ray particles are likely to penetrate much deeper into the atmosphere than previously thought. The incoming particles are therefore likely to be much heavier. New and fundamental insights emerge from a method that generalises the approach to predicting models of cosmic particle collisions with the Earth's atmosphere. The accuracy of Jakub Vícha's method has been confirmed by hundreds of international scientists at the Pierre Auger Observatory, as shown in a study published these days in Physical Review D.

A group of renowned scientists, nominated by academies through the European Commission’s Scientific Advice Mechanism, have advised Commissioners on the use of AI in science. Patrícia Martinková from the Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences was a member of the expert team.

A new biosafety laboratory BSL3 was opened today at the Biotechnology and Biomedicine Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Charles University in Vestec (BIOCEV), enabling safe work with highly infectious viruses and bacteria. This laboratory was built with funding from the EXCELES project of the National Institute of Virology and Bacteriology. The state-of-the-art facility costing nearly 65 million CZK will enable scientists to study, for example, hepatitis B, Rift Valley fever, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), as well as SARS-CoV-2. Studying the properties and life cycles of these and other viruses and studying their interaction with vectors will enable the identification of diagnostic and therapeutic targets.

Some molecules respond to external light pulses by changing their structure and holding certain states that can be switched from one to another. These are commonly referred to as photoswitches and usually have two possible states. Recently, however, scientists from IOCB Prague have developed a molecule that takes the possibilities of photoswitches a step further. The new molecule can be switched not between two, but between three distinct states. This gives it the ability to hold much more complex information in its molecular structure than has been possible so far. A paper on the topic, co-authored by PhD student Jakub Copko and Dr Tomáš Slanina, has now been published in the journal Chemical Communications.

The New Guinea region is known for being one of the most species-rich places in the world. Located north of Australia and south-east of Asia, New Guinea’s topographical complexity and geographic isolation has given rise to a huge diversity of life, much of it endemic. The island is home to at least 40 small mammal species found nowhere else on earth. However, small mammals in this region are not extensively monitored and we know little about their ranges, population statuses and threats.

Scientists found evidence that termites which lived millions of years ago engaged in the same mating behaviors described in their living relatives today. Approximately 40 million years ago two termites were in the middle of courtship behavior when they got entrapped by tree resin and preserved in fossilized amber. This so far oldest and only known fossil of an Electrotermes affinis termite pair gave researchers from the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) the unique chance to analyze the mating behavior of the extinct insects. Their findings were now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).