University of Tübingen microbiologist wins 2012 Sofja Kovalevskaja Award

Samuel Wagner examines how bacteria start infections - aiming to stop the mechanism and maybe use it in treatment.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has announced that one of this year's Sofja Kovalevskaja Awards goes this year to microbiologist Prof. Dr. Samuel Wagner, a junior professor at the University of Tübingen. The Award is one of Germany's biggest scientific awards, bringing with it prize money of up to €1.65m for each of this year's 14 winners.

The Award allows the scientists to carry out a research project over five years at an institute of their choice in Germany and to form their own working groups. Samuel Wagner will run his project at the University of Tübingen's Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene with Prof. Dr. Ingo B. Autenrieth. "I was delighted to win this award because it is wonderful recognition of my work to date, and because it creates the best possible conditions for research over the next five years," Professor Wagner said. "I decided to come to Tübingen because the University has an excellent reputation and is very strong in Microbiology, having a collaborative research center and a research training group in the field, and is a partner institution in the German Center for Infection Research. I was also very impressed by the effort the University made to get me on board, with attractive conditions for my junior professorship and a tenure track option." He came to Tübingen in February this year.

The Project
Bacteria use many different mechanisms to influence their surroundings. An example of this is type III secretion systems, which bacteria use to inject toxic proteins into their host cells. Professor Wagner is researching salmonella bacteria to find out how their "syringes" work at the molecular level, and how the proteins get through the inner bacterial membrane to the host cell. Since this is the way salmonella and other bacteria set off infections, Professor Wagner's work has tremendous potential for the development of new kinds of antibiotics which inhibit the secretion of bacterial proteins. And if the process can be fully understood, it may be possible to use it to send useful proteins to exactly the place they are needed within cells.

Biography of Prof. Dr. Samuel Wagner:
Born in 1978 in Marburg, studied in Marburg, went to the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden for his Mas-ter's degree, Doctorate at the University of Stockholm (2008). He was a visiting academic at Cornell University and a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, USA. In 2008 he founded the company Xbrane Bioscience in Stockholm. He has been a professor at the University of Tübingen since February 2012 and is a 2012 Kovalevskaja Award winner.

The Award is named after the Russian mathematician Sofja Kovalevskaja. Born in 1850, she com-pleted a doctorate at Göttingen University with a dissertation on "The theory of partial differential equations" in 1874 and was appointed to a full professorship in mathematics at Stockholm University in 1889. The Award is meant to integrate promising researchers into collaboration with academics in Germany at the beginning of their careers.