BMC scientist Nicolai Siegel is awarded an ERC grant

Nicolai Siegel has received a Consolidator Grant. It is already the second ERC grant in his careers. The award comes with funding of up to two million euros for a period of five years. By means of Consolidator Grants, the European Research Council (ERC) helps excellent academics expand and consolidate their innovative research. The basis for the decision of the ERC when awarding the prestigious grant is the academic excellence of the applicant and of the research project.

What is the project about?

Nicolai Siegel is head of the Molecular Parasitology research group. In his research, he is interested in how variability in pathogen populations contributes to the establishment of lasting infections.

The coronavirus pandemic has powerfully illustrated how variability among pathogens can affect the persistence of infections. A certain degree of cell-to-cell variation can help pathogens to evade the host immune response or to adapt to new environments. However, the level of variability is critical, as too much or too little variability can have negative consequences for the pathogen. In his project switchDecoding, Nicolai Siegel plans to elucidate the mechanisms that control variability in pathogen populations. To this end, he will use Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite responsible for sleeping sickness in Sub-Saharan Africa as a model. Here, he will investigate how the parasite repeatedly alters its surface proteins – so-called antigens – to evade the immune defenses of its host. In a multidisciplinary approach, he plans to develop and combine single-cell multi-omics, lineage tracing, and CRISPR-Cas-based genome manipulation strategies in order to characterize the processes, pathways, and molecules that regulate antigen variation in T. brucei. The goal of the project is to better understand how pathogens adapt to their environment and potentially develop resistances. This knowledge should help with the development of new intervention strategies and drugs.

Nicolai Siegel studied biochemistry at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. After completing a doctorate at Rockefeller University in New York, he did postdoc research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. From 2012, Siegel headed a Young Investigator Group at the ZINF Research Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of Würzburg, before taking on the role of a Professor for Molecular Parasitology at LMU in 2017. He has already received an ERC Starting Grant in 2016.

(Text: adapted from LMU.de)