Issue 1 | 2022

This year began with tremendously good news: Ganna Gryn’ova, head of the Computational Carbon Chemistry (CCC) group, was selected to receive a prestigious ERC Starting Grant of around 1.5 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC grants reflect the high quality of our research. Researchers in six out of thirteen groups are now working with funding from an ERC grant or are involved as beneficiaries.

Researchers from the Computational Molecular Evolution (CME) group at HITS have been involved in building the digital infrastructure “Serratus”. It enables researchers to effectively search public sequence databases for biological viruses. So far, it has been used to identify more than 130,000 new RNA viruses – from corona viruses to relatives of the hepatitis D virus and bacteriophages. The results were published in the scientific journal “Nature”.

Finally, we present “SIMPLAIX”, a three-way-cooperation between HITS, the University of Heidelberg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation. This research initiative combines multiscale simulation and machine learning. SIMPLAIX is coordinated by HITS researchers Rebecca Wade and Frauke Gräter.