Dr Patrick Pausch, research professor and group leader at the Vilnius University Life Sciences Center (VU LSC)-European Molecular Biology Laboratory Partnership Institute (EMBL PI), has received a substantial European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) Installation Grant (IG). According to Dr Pausch, the installation grant scheme is invaluable for young scientists establishing their laboratories.

Today EMBO has announced the 11 winners of the 2023 EMBO Installation Grants, which provide multi-year funding for principal investigators to establish and grow their groups in participating countries. Among them, there are 2 Lithuanian representatives from Vilnius University (VU) Life Sciences Center (LSC): Dr Gytis Dudas (on the left, in the photo) and Dr Patrick Pausch. This EMBO funding scheme provides researchers in participating countries with several years of funding to set up and develop research teams.

Two scientists from the Life Sciences Centre (LSC) were awarded the Rector's Prizes at festive meeting of the VU Senate. The award was also presented to the best LSC lecturer. 

Closing the old year and welcoming the New Year, the Vilnius University community chooses the best lecturers of the year. This year, Dr Radvilė Rimgailė-Voicik was elected the best lecturer of the Department of Botany and Genetics of the Institute of Biosciences, VU Life Sciences Center.

The latest subject rankings of the country’s educational institutions were published today. Vilnius University (VU) was the best performer in the ranking, as it is every year – the University was declared the leader in more than one-third of the evaluated bachelor’s degree programmes and almost half of the master’s degree programmes. In terms of the total sum of all indicators, the best-ranked bachelor’s degree programmes at Vilnius University are Computer Science (93.7), Genetics (89.8), and Journalism (89.6). In the category of master’s studies, VU’s highest-ranked master’s programmes are Physics (93.1), Chemistry (92.6), Biochemistry (91.6), and Education (89.2).

Dr Rokas Grigaitis is one of the two young scientists from the VU LSC who have received the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) scholarship.

Vilnius University (VU) Life Sciences Center (LSC) biochemist Dr Stephen Knox Jones Jr. and the team he leads have been awarded a prestigious 1.2 million Euro grant. The European Research Council Starting Grant established by the European Research Council (ERC) is the first of its kind in Lithuania. It has been awarded to the scientist for the next five years to carry out the project “Nuclease profiling and off-target rearrangement to expand gene editing”, which aims to improve gene editing methods.

The Lithuanian Union of Young Scientists has announced and the President of the Republic of Lithuania Gitanas Nausėda has awarded the winners of the Best Dissertations 2021 competition. The dissertations of Milda Mickutė and Žana Kapustina (2 of the 10 best dissertations) were written and defended at the Vilnius University Life Sciences Centre.

Two scientists have already been awarded a European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) fellowship at the VU Life Sciences Centre. One of them is Dr Jorūnė Sakalauskaitė, who will be giving a seminar entitled ‘Search for ancient proteins: the present & the future of palaeoproteomics‘ this Friday at the VU LSC.

The article entitled ‘Selective chemical tracking of Dnmt1 catalytic activity in live cells’ by researchers of Vilnius University Life Sciences Centre (VU LSC) Institute of Biotechnology Vaidotas Stankevičius, Povilas Gibas, Bernadeta Masiulionytė, Liepa Gasiulė, Viktoras Masevičius, Saulius Klimašauskas and Giedrius Vilkaitis has been published in Molecular Cell,  a prestigious and highly cited journal. In the same issue of the journal, Prof. Saulius Klimašauskas, Prof. Giedrius Vilkaitis and Dr. Vaidotas Stankevičius feature ‘Meet the Authors’ series about the published work and stories behind it.

A project at the Institute of Biotechnology of the VU Life Sciences Centre for the treatment of various human genetic diseases using gene therapy has won the ‚Europos burės 2022‘ (European Sails 2022) award. It was recognised as the best in the category ‚Efficiency in Medicine‘.

Their Royal Highnesses King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium visited the VU Life Sciences Centre, where Prof. Virginijus Šikšnys presented gene editing technology. 

2 articles were published in the journal Nature Microbiology (IF 30.964) are dedicated to functional and mechanism studies of short prokaryotic Argonaute proteins. They crowned the productive collaboration of the Department of Protein-Nucleic acids interactions group, Institute of Biotechnology (BTI), Vilnius University Life Sciences Centre (VU GMC), led by dr. Mindaugas Zaremba and prof. Virginijus Šikšnys, and the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) Department of Molecular Genetics, headed by prof. Rotem Sorek.