Laura Geid (IFI) honored with a Marietta Blau-Fellowship

Laura Geid from the Institute of Immunology (Research Group Ruth Herbst) has been honored with a Marietta Blau-Fellowship.

Laura Geid has been awarded with a Marietta Blau-Fellowship for a research visit abroad. With the help of this fellowship Laura will visit the laboratory of Dr. Tomasz J. Prószyński at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw (Poland) to perform important experiments to extend her PhD project, which focusses on the trafficking processes of the receptor tyrosine kinase MuSK during neuromuscular junction formation.

The Marietta Blau-Fellowship offers financial support for six- to twelve-month study periods abroad for doctoral or PhD students of Austrian universities. It serves to optimise their dissertations. The programme is financed by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research and junior researchers are the main target group.

The project

At the neuromuscular junction signals from the central nervous system are transmitted to the skeletal muscle. MuSK is essential for the building of the neuromuscular junction. Downregulation or knock-out of MuSK in animal models leads to the perinatal death due to respiratory failure. In addition, defective MuSK function causes muscle weakness in patients as seen in disorders such as Myasthenia gravis and congenital myasthenic sydromes. The aim of Laura’s PhD thesis is to decipher MuSK trafficking and its rule in the development of the neuromuscular junction.

29.01.2019