UCMR DAY 2020 with record number of participants
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Yaowen Wu and Teresa Frisan are new UCMR Director and Deputy Director, respectively, and Vice Directors Fredrik Almqvist and Constantin Urban complete the new leadership team. UCMR Ambassadors 2020: Anita Kiss, Karim Rafie and Nunya Chotiwan. Agrisera Poster Prize to Anita Kiss.
With more than 180 participants, the Umeå Centre for Microbial Research held its annual symposium, the UCMR DAY 2020, for the eleventh time on January 23rd. The event, at Aula Nordica this year, included new activities to enhance the interaction and networking among the scientists of this Centre of Excellence which has been supported since 2008 by a Linnaeus Grant from the Swedish Research Council (VR).
Ivan Dikic, Professor, Director
Thomas Nyström, Professor
[2019-10-25] Congratulations to six UCMR/MIMS PIs, who will receive funding from the Swedish Research Council!
[2019-06-24] It was a big surprise for both Bernt Eric Uhlin, founding director of MIMS, and the audience attending the “10 years of MIMS symposium”, when Emmanuelle Charpentier – one of the first group leaders who started a lab at MIMS - entered the podium and gave a speech to honor Bernt Eric and MIMS.
A research team lead by MIMS/SciLifeLab research group leader Jonas Barandun uses cryo-electron microscopy to provide near atomic details of the smallest known eukaryotic cytoplasmic protein synthesis machine, the microsporidian ribosome. 
150 years ago, the European silk industry was threatened by an unknown epidemic killing the silkworms. At that time, Louis Pasteur was able to identify the source of infection and made important suggestions for treatment. The silk production in Europe survived. Today, a microsporidian parasite is known as the cause of this epidemic and silk worm diseases still cause more than 100 million USD losses to the Chinese silk industry every year. Microsporidiosis is not restricted to silk worms. The diverse phylum of the microsporidia contains thousands of different species with parasites for essentially every animal. At least 14 of them can infect humans. Particularly challenged by microsporidia are not only aquacultures, sericultures and honey bee populations in which infections can wipe out entire hives, but also immunocompromised patients. Microsporidia are a risk for the environment, agriculture and human health and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently added the parasitic fungi to the list of emerging pathogens of high priority. Even if microsporidia infections are among the most common parasitic diseases in all animals, relatively little is known about their fascinating molecular life which is shaped by an accelerated evolutionary rate and extreme genome compaction.