Recent reports suggest that somatic cell-derived induced neurons (iNs), but not induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived neurons largely preserve age-associated traits such as age-specific DNA methylation patterns, transcriptomic aging signatures and nuclear lamina-associated changes.

How will crops grow in the future under the intensified conditions of climate change? Upcoming research projects at the University of Bonn will use the new climate chamber greenhouse to explore this question. In this facility, temperature, humidity, and light can be adjusted with the highest precision for experiments. This new climate chamber greenhouse complex, covering 656 square meters, has now been inaugurated at the Faculty of Agricultural, Nutritional and Engineering Sciences and will be used by researchers from several faculties. 

Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark, the Novo Nordisk Center for Adipocyte Signaling (SDU), the University of Bonn and the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) have found a protein that is responsible for turning off brown fat activity. This new discovery could lead to a promising strategy for safely activating brown fat and tackling obesity and related health problems. The results of the study have now been published in the journal „Nature Metabolism“.

A receding hairline, a total loss of hair from the crown, and ultimately, the classical horseshoe-shaped pattern of baldness: Previous research into male pattern hair loss, also termed androgenetic alopecia, has implicated multiple common genetic variants. Human geneticists from the University Hospital of Bonn (UKB) and by the Transdisciplinary Research Unit “Life & Health” of the University of Bonn have now performed a systematic investigation of the extent to which rare genetic variants may also contribute to this disorder. For this purpose, they analyzed the genetic sequences of 72,469 male participants from the UK Biobank project. The analyses identified five significantly associated genes, and further corroborated genes implicated in previous research. The results have now been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications.

The brain has the ability to modify the contacts between neurons. Among other things, that is how it prevents brain activity from getting out of control. Researchers from the University Hospital Bonn, together with a team from Australia, have identified a mechanism that plays an important role in this. In cultured cells, this mechanism alters the synaptic coupling of neurons and thus stimulus transmission and processing. If it is disrupted, diseases such as epilepsy, schizophrenia or autism may be the result. The findings are published in the journal Cell Reports.

Dr. Katharina C. Cramer, Nicolas Rüffin, and Dr. Kristofer Rolf Söderström have successfully made the transition from researchers to entrepreneurs and founded the start-up TILLER ALPHA GmbH in early 2025. “It’s important to us to communicate this change of roles openly,” emphasizes Katharina. Their clients, like themselves, come from the scientific community: TILLER ALPHA provides data-driven and AI-supported analyses for research infrastructures. Katharina also explored this topic in her research at the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn. In this interview, she explains their business idea, the start-up journey, and the support they received from the Transfer Center enaCom.

Too much fat can be unhealthy: how fat cells, so-called adipocytes, develop, is crucial for the function of the fat tissue. That is why a team led by researchers from the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn investigated the influence of primary cilia dysfunction on adipocyte precursor cells in a mouse model. They found that overactivation of the Hedgehog signaling pathway causes abnormal development into connective tissue-like cells instead of white fat cells. Their findings have now been published in The EMBO Journal.

The identification of genes involved in diseases is one of the major challenges of biomedical research. Researchers at the University of Bonn and the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) have developed a method that makes their identification much easier and faster: they light up genome sequences in the cell nucleus. In contrast to complex screenings using established methods, the NIS-Seq method can be used to investigate the genetic determinants of almost any biological process in human cells. The study has now been published in Nature Biotechnology.