The Code of Conduct serves as a fundamental guide for teaching, studying, and working at the Faculty of Medicine at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Bonn. It is intended to provide a sense of security in our interactions for faculty, students, and staff of diverse nationalities, backgrounds, and religious affiliations, and to foster a trusting atmosphere for learning, studying, and working.

The PearNet project is developing special wearables—body-worn electronic devices—that give epilepsy patients advance warning of seizures and monitor and record them when they happen. The brainchild of researchers from the University Hospital Bonn and University of Bonn, it has now secured some €2.7 million in funding over three years via the GO-Bio next program run by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). The money will go toward making further preparations for spinning off the project so that its set of wearables can be launched on the biotechnology market.

People who want to do something for their health these days often turn to Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms for information. But what’s really behind the posts and trends shared by health influencers? On May 13, the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation3 at the University of Bonn invited the public to join five professors for dinner to explore this question. In a relaxed atmosphere, social media posts on health and the immune system were presented, discussed by the approximately 40 participants, and analyzed together with the experts. The launch of this new format took place at John Barleycorn as part of Bonn’s “May of Science.”

The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) has announced that a new Collaborative Research Center (CRC) is to be set up at the University of Bonn: the “FoodDiverse” collaborative project, which is studying the diversification of food systems. The University will also be involved in a new CRC/Transregio (CRC-TRR) looking at narratives from pre-modern times and various cultural contexts, while two existing CRC-TRRs have been extended for another funding period. TRRs are projects that are implemented by several universities working together.

The loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities, which is experienced in everyday life and can be very distressing, is a core symptom of major depression. However, it has remained unclear exactly how anhedonia, also known as a pleasure deficit, manifests itself. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn, and the University Hospital Tübingen have found that people with depression do not perceive food as less rewarding when they actually consume it. The differences compared to people without depression emerge during anticipation: how much they want something before they receive it. This reduced desire is also linked to the clinical severity of anhedonia. The study’s findings have now been published in the journal “Cell Reports Medicine.”

Mild brain injuries, such as those often sustained in accidents, sports or violence can lead to persistent memory problems and an increased risk of dementia. However, there are currently no therapies available to treat these consequences. A research team led by the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn has now discovered that the protein ASC – a component of cellular emergency buttons – causes long-lasting inflammation in the brains of mice for up to 21 days after injury. By elucidating the inflammatory mechanisms underlying traumatic brain injury, the research team hopes to identify starting points for future therapeutic strategies. The work published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation lays the foundation for future clinical studies.

How do our genes determine our appearance and our susceptibility to disease? This question is central to biomedical research, and today we can sequence thousands of human genomes to identify these genes. However, genes work in complex networks. In a major transdisciplinary collaboration, an international team of geneticists and bioinformaticians set out to create a so-called genetic interaction (GI) map of a human cell. With significant contributions from the Canadian Donnelly Centre, the University of Minnesota, the Hospital for Sick Children in Canada, the University Hospital Bonn, and the University of Bonn, a first draft has now been published in the journal Cell. This draft currently covers about 2.5 percent of all possible gene pairs. 

Myofibrillar myopathy type 6 (MFM6) is a rare genetic muscle disorder that leads to severe muscle weakness and a drastically shortened life expectancy due to a disruption in muscle protein regulation. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn developed a mouse model for the disease and were thus able to show that a disruption in cellular recycling—known technically as autophagy—is the primary trigger for the disease. Their findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.