Jörn Piel receives award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

Jörn Piel and Roman Stocker are two scientists who study the secret relationships of marine microbes at ETH Zurich. Now they will each receive an “Investigator Award” from the renowned Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation amounting to USD 1.5 million. The prize, which is awarded as a grant, enables the two ETH professors to research aquatic symbioses involving microorganisms for five years.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has been established by the Intel co-​founder Gordon Moore and his wife Betty in 2000 with USD 5 billion in initial capital. Since then, they have supported projects in fundamental research, environmental protection and health.

With the “Symbiosis in Aquatic Systems” initiative, the foundation supports 15 individual research projects conducted by scientists from various universities worldwide. They have a common focus on marine and freshwater ecosystems.

Jörn Piel’s research project revolves around marine sponges, which phylogenetically are one of the oldest multicellular animals. Sponges form intimate partnerships with bacteria, which can make up a substantial part of the sponge biomass. Sponge bacteria produce, among other things, defensive substances that protect the community from predators and overgrowing organisms.

“We want to develop methods to more precisely characterise these fascinating but elusive associations,” explains Jörn Piel. He is interested in the bioactive substances and how they are synthesised by the bacteria. These natural substances, which are currently very difficult to access, are potential candidates for new antibiotics or agents for cancer therapy. However, most sponge bacteria cannot be cultivated in the laboratory to date.

Further information

News article of ETH
Focus on microbial communities (press release, 30.05.2017)
Sponge bacteria as a chemical factory (ETH News, 29.01.2014)

external page Announcement of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation