Uwe Ohler, Professor of Computational Regulatory Genomics at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin and one of the fifteen ORFeus principal investigators, has been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for his project TRANS-DECODE.
The grant provides EUR 2.5 million over five years for research into how cells regulate translation, the process by which messenger RNA is read and turned into protein. The project will combine machine learning with advanced molecular biology to find regulatory elements hidden within RNA, understand how manipulating them affects protein output, and develop molecular tools for targeted intervention.
This is directly relevant to ORFeus. Translation regulation is at the heart of the dark proteome: understanding which short open reading frames are translated, when, and why is the central question the network was built to answer. In ORFeus, Uwe supervises DC2, which develops single-molecule approaches to map translation at isoform-level resolution, and co-supervises DC1 (AI-driven smORF prediction) and DC15 (cryptic peptide presentation in melanoma).
The ERC Advanced Grant is one of Europe’s highest individual research honors. This year, 319 researchers were selected from over 3,300 applicants. Congratulations, Uwe!