Due to a very generous donation of Mrs. Barbara Risau to the Werner-Risau-Prize fund, the financial contribution that is awarded together with the personal diploma has been increased to the sum of

€ 4000.

The new Werner-Riisau-Prize will be awarded for the first time during the next meeting of the Swiss and German Societies for Cell Biology on March 25, 2009 in Konstanz, Germany. The increased prize money will certainly help to promote the popularity of the Werner-Risau-Prize and further raise its visibility and significance within the scientific community and especially amongst vascular biologists.

Here are the topics of the meeting:
Carl Zeiss Lecture: Rudolf Jaenisch (Cambridge, USA)
Symposia
A: Dynamics of the cytoskeleton (Jürgen Wehland, Braunschweig)
B: Physiology of cellular growth control (Christian Frei, Zürich)
C: Vesicle trafficking (Suzanne Pfeffer, Stanford, CA)
D: Cellular microbiology (Pascal Cossart, Paris)
E: Regulation of cellular processes by microRNAs (Ueli Schibler, Genf)
F: Systems biology of phosphatidyl-inositol-phosphate signaling (Tobias Meyer, Stanford, CA)

Minisymposia
1: Ubiquitination and the proteasome (Marcus Groettrup, Konstanz & Ivan Dikic, Frankfurt)
2: Nuclear architecture (Francois Karch, Genf)
3: Stem cells (Karlheinz Krause, Genf, & Marcel Leist, Konstanz)
4: Cellular aging (Alexander Bürkle, Konstanz, & Thomas von Zglinicki, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK)
5: Chemical approaches in Cell Biology (Thomas U. Mayer, Konstanz)
6: Tissue remodelling (Wieland Huttner, Dresden)
7: Cell polarity (Kai Simons, Dresden)
8: Regulation of the cell cycle (Ingrid Hoffmann, Heidelberg & Erich Nigg, Martinsried)
9: The cellular basis of innate immunity (Bruno Lemaître, Lausanne)
10: Label-free microscopic methods (Andreas Zumbusch, Konstanz)

More detailed information to the program, registration, abstract submission etc. is again available at the zellbiologie website
www.zellbiologie2009.de

In the download section you now can find the application documents for the 2009 Werner-Risau-Prize. As in the previous years, this prize will again be awarded during the Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Zellbiologie, which will be organized from March 24-27, 2009 in Konstanz this time, together with colleagues from Switzerland. So the audience will be even more "international" than in the previous years and the awardee will have a very unique platform to present his work. Therefore, if you think you might be qualified, then don´t hesitate to apply - or hurry up and do the experiments that have to be done to finish your paper!!

Dr. Jonathan Leslie from the Vertebrate Development Laboratory of the Cancer Research UK, London was elected as this years WRP winner. In his studies he used zebrafish as a model system and investigated the role of delta-notch cell-cell signalling in blood vessel development. He could show that Notch signalling is important in switching the endothelium off once vascular patterning is complete and that defects in this regulatory circuit leads to excessive sprouting, filopodia formation and proliferation of the endothelial cells, when the cells should already have adopted a quiescent state.
His work was published in the December issue of Development (Development 2007,134: 839-844) and was critically acclaimed shortly afterwards in Nature (Gridley, T (2007). Nature 445 (7129): 722-723) and in two NatureReviews Research Highlights (Mullard, A (2007). Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 8: 182-183 and Mullard, A (2007). NatureReviews Genetics 8: 172).

Just remember: January 31, 2008 is the deadline for registering for the 2008 German Society of Cell Biology (DGZ) meeting to be held in Marburg from March 12-15. You still will be able to register at a later time point, however, fees will go up. So get your act together and register! You won´t regret it! For details see the homepage of the meeting.

Dr. Judah Folkman, a path-breaking cancer researcher who faced years of skepticism before his ideas led to successful treatments, died Monday January 14 in Denver. He was 74.

We all deeply regret to hear about the death of this great visionary, who pioneered the field of angiogenesis research. It was in his lab, where Werner Risau had developed the concept that blood vessel formation during embryonic development could occur by similar mechanisms as during tumour growth, further continuing on this topic when he had returned to Germany.

All members of the Werner Risau Prize Commitee had had the chance to meet with Judah Folkman once in a while and we all agree that it was always a distinct pleasure to discuss science with him. "Spectacular" and "Fantastic" were words that he used quite often in these discussions, when we explained our research projects - and although we knew that there was still room for improvement in the studies that we presented, we all were caught by his enthusiasm.

Read more in a New York Times article.