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EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020 supports project “FOLSMART” of Hannes Stockinger and Anna Repic

In January 2016, a new Horizon 2020 project entitled “Folate-Target Nanodevices To Activated Macrophages For Rheumatoid Arthritis – FOLSMART” starts at the Institute for Hygiene and Applied Immunology at the Center for...more

 

Poster Prize at the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Society of Tropical Medicine, Parasitology and Migration Medicine for Anna-Margarita SCHÖTTA

At the 49th Annual Meeting of the Austrian Society of Tropical Medicine, Parasitology and Migration Medicine (ÖGTPM), held from 12 – 14 November 2015 in Vienna, Anna-Margarita Schötta was awarded the Poster Prize 2015.more

 

Great success for the 7th EFIS-EJI South Eastern European Immunology School (SEEIS2015)

At this year's summer school, held from 16 – 19 October 2015 in Becici, Montenegro, participants from all over the world could benefit from lectures and workshops in basic and clinical immunology.more

 

Opening of the 14th International Conference on Lyme Borreliosis and other Tick-Borne Diseases

Congress president Gerold Stanek opened the Congress on September 27, 2015 in the presence of more than 400 participants from all continents, together with Allen C. Steere, who discovered in 1975 the Lyme disease.more

 

140 Years Hygiene Institute celebrated at the 6th Center's Retreat

At the beginning of the 6th Retreat of the Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology, held on September 22, 2015, Rector Schütz was honored and the 140th anniversary of the Insitute for Hygiene and Applied...more

 

Poster prizes at the 6th Center's Retreat

At the 6th Retreat of the Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology, held on September 22, 2015, 94 projects were presented as short presentations and posters. The best presentations were awarded, 5 awardees out of...more

 

Österreichischer Hygiene-Preis für Sílvia Cervero-Aragó

Im Rahmen des 23. Dosch-Symposiums für Krankenhaushygiene, das vom 15. bis 17. Juni 2015 in Velden am Wörthersee stattfand, wurde der österreichische Hygiene-Preis an unsere Mitarbeiterin Sílvia Cervero-Aragó verliehen.more

 

Award for Alexander ZWIRZITZ at the 11th YSA PhD-Symposium

At the 11th YSA PhD-Symposium of the Medical University of Vienna, held from 10 – 11 June 2015, Alexander ZWIRZITZ from the Molecular Immunology Unit received a Best Oral Presentation Award.more

 

Appointment of Johannes HUPPA as Associate Professor

Johannes Huppa, PhD, was appointed Associate Professor by the Rector in June 2015 because of his outstanding achievements in the Immune Cognition Group of the Molecular Immunology Unit.more

 

TU Wien und MedUni Wien forschen gemeinsam im Interuniversitären Kooperationszentrum „Water and Health“

Im Interuniversitären Kooperationszentrum (ICC) „Water and Health“ forschen TU Wien und MedUni Wien gemeinsam daran, die hohe Qualität des Wiener Trinkwassers für die Zukunft zu sichern.more

 

Karin Pfisterer is "Researcher of the Month" March 2015

Mag. Dr. Karin Pfisterer of the Molecular Immunology Unit of the Institute for Hygiene and Applied Immunology has been awarded the title "Researcher of the Month" March 2015 by the Medical University of Vienna.more

 

WWTF promotes a project of Johannes Huppa with 582.000 EUR

Johannes Huppa from the Institute of Hygiene and Applied Immunology receives a grant of 582.000 EUR from the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) for his project "High-Resolution Imaging to Unravel the Molecular Etiology of...more

 

Florian Forster was awarded the Thesis Prize of the Austrian Society of Allergology and Immunology

At the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Society of Allergology and Immunology (ÖGAI), held from November 6 – 8, 2014 in Salzburg, Florian Forster received this prestigious award.more

 

Habilitation colloquium of Miranda SUCHOMEL – congratulations !

On 15th October 2014 Miranda Suchomel from the Institute for Hygiene and Applied Immunology habilitated in the special field "Hygiene".more

 

Great success for the 6th EFIS-EJI South Eastern European Immunology School (SEEIS2014)

At this year's summer school, held from 26 – 29 September 2014 in Timisoara, participants from all over the world could benefit from lectures and workshops in basic and clinical immunology.more

 

Poster prizes at the 5th Center's retreat

At the 5th Retreat of the Center held on September 16, 2014, 78 projects were presented as short presentations and posters. The best presentations were awarded, 5 awardees out of 13 are from our Institute!more

 

Poster prize at the 11th EFIS-EJI Tatra Immunology Conference from 6 – 10 September 2014 for KARIN PFISTERER

At the 11th EFIS-EJI Tatra Immunology Conference from 6 – 10 September 2014 in Strbske Pleso, Slovakia, a jury of six top international researchers selected three posters out of 56 for the poster prize.more

 

Poster Prize for the Institute on the Conference of the Austrian Society for Hygiene, Microbiology and Preventive Medicine (ÖGHMP)

Anna-Margarita Schötta, Michael Reiter, Andreas Müller, Hannes Stockinger and Gerold Stanek.more

 

Research grant from the Hans and Blanca Moser-Foundation to Paul Spechtl

This year's "research grant to support the training of medical students in the field of translational cancer research" of the Hans and Blanca Moser-Foundation is accorded to Paul Spechtl, medical student and graduate student in...more

 

Novel Cytoskeletal Regulator discovered

The T Cell Signal Transduction Group of the Molecular Immunology Unit discovered with research partners from Erlangen how T cells control via the cytokine interferon-gamma cytoskeleton-dependent cellular responses.more

 
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Inhaltsbereich

August 2, 2021: MedUni Wien "Researcher of the Month" August 2021, René Platzer, BSc MSc PhD

The “Researcher of the Month” jury gives the award for this month to René Platzer on the occasion of the work published in the top journal “Nature Communications” (IF 13.610) „Unscrambling fluorophore blinking for comprehensive cluster detection via photoactivated localization microscopy“.

René Platzer, BSc MSc PhD

The present study was carried out as a multidisciplinary project between the research groups of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Johannes Huppa at the Institute for Hygiene and Applied Immunology at the Medical University of Vienna and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schütz at the Institute for Applied Physics at the Technical University of Vienna.

How to outsmart the laws of nature - but not entirely

High-resolution fluorescence microscopy (or super-resolution microscopy) is used all over the world today to make the smallest structures on a cell visible and to understand the interaction of molecules on the cell surface. This technology actually contradicts a principle that has long been considered a law of nature: With light waves you can only image objects that are larger than half the light wavelength. This rule is true, but it can be outwitted if different points on the object are illuminated one after the other over a longer period of time - for example fluorescence-marked molecules on the cell surface. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 2014 for this basic idea of ​​super-resolution microscopy. Since then, this microscopy technique has proven itself time and again all over the world. But a team of scientists at the Medical University of Vienna and TU Vienna have now shown that high-resolution (super-resolution) images are often deceptive and that one has to be very careful when interpreting the data. Although super-resolution microscopy makes individual molecules visible, it can easily happen that a molecule is imaged several times. A simple multiple exposure can then be mistaken for a cluster of several molecules [5]. René Platzer worked closely with Dr. Benedikt Rossboth and Dr. Mario Brameshuber developed a method to differentiate between these two possibilities.

In addition, with this improved technology, the researchers were able to show once again that the highly sensitive antigen receptors on a T cell do not occur in enriched groups, as was first assumed, but are distributed randomly on the cell surface [1,2]. As an important part of our immune system, T cells react to an extremely small number of certain antigens that are on the surface of antigen-presenting cells [3]. The theory persisted for a long time that antigen receptors on the T-cell surface are locally enriched in small groups (clusters) in order to make the T-cells more sensitive for the recognition of antigens. The new results contradict this theory and point to the possibility that the visible clusters are complex image artifacts and that individual receptors are actually randomly distributed on the cell surface, presumably to enable accelerated scanning of antigen-presenting cells [2,3,4] .

With the help of high-resolution fluorescence microscopy, René Platzer and his colleagues hope to gain further deep insights into the biophysical principles of T-cell antigen recognition, above all to understand this highly sensitive and vital process down to the smallest detail. This technology and the knowledge gained from it form an important basis for future projects with partners from medicine, research and industry, which aim to establish more effective immunotherapies.

Scientific environment

Over the years, René Platzer's scientific work has been shaped by an extremely interdisciplinary research environment. At the Institute of Hygiene and Applied Immunology in the laboratory of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Johannes Huppa and Univ.-Prof Dr. Hannes Stockinger, he played a decisive role in setting up the infrastructure for protein biochemistry and high-resolution fluorescence microscopy. René Platzer is in constant contact with the research group of Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schütz at the Institute for Applied Physics at the Technical University of Vienna. This intensive and long-term collaboration resulted in several publications that mainly dealt with the biophysical basis of T cell antigen recognition (Hellmeier et al. 2021 PNAS, Göhring et al. 2021 Nature Communications, Rossboth et al. 2018 Nature Immunology and Varadi et al. 2019 Biophysical Journal). In addition, he was involved with considerable interest and scientific enthusiasm in numerous projects within the Medical University of Vienna (Ohradanova-Repic et al. 2018 Frontiers in Immunology, Kumar et al. 2015 Biomedical Optics Express and Hamminger et al. 2021 Journal of Autoimmunity), of the St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute (Salzer et al. 2016 Nature Immunology and Salzer et al. 2020 Science Immunology), as well as international collaborations (Jongsma et al. 2020 Immunity). Many of the extremely exciting cross-institute and cross-border collaborations resulted in publications in renowned specialist journals.

To person

René Platzer graduated from the Bundesgymnasium and Bundesrealgymnasium Leibnitz in 2007 and studied molecular biology at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz and the Technical University Graz. After completing his bachelor's degree and a 3-month internship at the University of Zurich, he studied immunology and molecular microbiology at the University of Vienna. At the end of his master's degree, René Platzer completed two summer schools with a focus on biomedical microscopy and high-resolution microscopy at the ETH Zurich and at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences in Amsterdam, which from now on shaped his scientific work. René Platzer worked in the laboratory of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Johannes Huppa and Univ.- Prof. Dr. Hannes Stockinger at the Institute for Hygiene and Applied Immunology and dealt with the question of how certain processes of T cell antigen recognition take place at the molecular level. In the course of his dissertation, René Platzer dealt with the biophysical principles of antigen presentation and the associated T-cell activation and played a key role in the development of new analysis methods for high-resolution fluorescence microscopy. As a doctoral student, René Platzer took part in the international PhD program “Cell Communication in Health and Disease” (CCHD) and received a renowned and highly competitive PhD grant from the Boehringer Ingelheim Fund. He attended numerous national and international conferences at which he also won prizes for the presentation of his scientific results.

After completing his PhD studies, René Platzer continues his scientific work at the Medical University of Vienna as a collaborator in a research collaboration between Assoc. Prof. Dr. Johannes Huppa and Boehringer Ingelheim RCV continued. In this project he characterizes various BiTE antibodies (bispecific T-cell engagers) with regard to their potential for T-cell activation and initiation of an immune response. He researches how natural T cell antigen recognition processes differ from therapeutic approaches such as BiTE antibodies or CAR T cells (chimeric antigen receptor T cells) in order to support the development of effective BiTE antibodies for cancer therapy.

Selected literature

  1. Platzer R*, Rossboth BK*, Schneider MC, Sevcsik E, Baumgart F, Stockinger H, Schütz GJ, Huppa JB+, and Brameshuber M+. 2020. Unscrambling fluorophore blinking for comprehensive cluster detection via photoactivated localization microscopy. Nature Communications. 11:4993. *equal contribution, +corresponding author
  2. Rossboth B, Arnold AM, Ta H, Platzer R, Kellner F, Huppa JB, Brameshuber M+, Baumgart F+, and Schütz GJ+. 2018. TCRs are randomly distributed on the plasma membrane of resting antigen-experienced T cells. Nature Immunology. 19:821-827. +corresponding author
  3. Platzer R and Huppa JB. T-cell Antigen Recognition – Lessons from the Past and Projections into the Future. 2020. Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (eLS). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester. doi: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0001229.pub3.
  4. Brameshuber, M, Kellner F*, Rossboth BK*, Ta H, Alge K, Sevcsik E, Göhring J, Axmann M, Baumgart F, Gascoigne NRJ, Davis SJ, Stockinger H, Schütz GJ, and Huppa JB+. 2018. Monomeric TCRs drive T cell antigen recognition. Nature Immunology. 19:487-496. *equal contribution, +corresponding author
  5. Baumgart F, Arnold AM, Rossboth BK, Brameshuber M, and Schütz GJ+. 2018. What we talk about when we talk about nanoclusters. Methods and Applications in Fluorescence. 7:013001. +corresponding author
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