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The Year in Biology

December 19, 2023

Video : During 2023, Quanta turned a spotlight on important research progress into the nature of consciousness, the origins of our microbiomes and the timekeeping mechanisms that govern our lives and development, among many other discoveries.

Ibrahim Rayintakath for Quanta Magazine (cover); Emily Buder/ Quanta Magazine and Taylor Hess and Noah Hutton for Quanta Magazine  (video)

Introduction

Revolutions in the biological sciences can take many forms. Sometimes they erupt from the use of a novel tool or the invention of a radical theory that suddenly opens so many new avenues for research, it can feel dizzying. Sometimes they take shape slowly, through the slow accumulation of studies, each one representing years of painstaking work, that collectively chip away at the prevailing wisdom and reveal a stronger, better intellectual framework. Both kinds of revolution unleash avalanches of new ideas and insights that improve our understanding of how life works.

This past year has had no shortage of these. For example, researchers successfully grew “embryo models” — lab-grown artificial embryos that mature like real ones — that reached a more advanced developmental stage than ever before. That accomplishment could eventually yield valuable new insights into how human fetuses grow, although debate about the ethical status of those models seems likely, too. Meanwhile, in the world of neuroscience, researchers studying depression have continued to move away from the theory that has generally guided much of the research and pharmaceutical treatment of that disease for decades.

But those kinds of biological revolution involve human ingenuity, with researchers in the life sciences coming to new realizations. Revolutions also occur in the biology itself — when evolution has enabled organisms to do something unprecedented. Biologists have recently discovered many more instances of this kind of breakthrough.

Keeping track of time, for instance, is a function that’s essential to all living things, from microorganisms biding their time till the next cell division to embryos growing limbs and organs, to more complex critters tracking the passage of day and night. Teams of researchers plugging away in laboratories around the world have recently discovered that some key features of timekeeping are tied to cellular metabolism — which means that the organelle called the mitochondrion is both a generator and a clock. Other aspects of timekeeping are metered by the progress of a molecular ballet in which specialized proteins pirouette together before separating again.

Researchers also hope to soon make important discoveries now that they can culture some of the primitive, long-lost cells called Asgard archaea . A billion years ago, Asgard archaea (or cells much like them) took the outrageous step of forming permanent partnerships with the ancestors of mitochondria, thereby giving birth to the first complex cells. The secrets of how and why that biological breakthrough happened may be lurking in those exotic cell cultures. Meanwhile, other researchers are scrutinizing the “grit crust” microbes that live in the infamously arid Atacama Desert of Chile for clues to how the first land-dwelling cells survived.

Enough marvelous biological innovations were discovered in 2023 to form a veritable parade: plankton that supercharged their photosynthetic abilities by repurposing one of their membranes, and underground microbes that learned to make oxygen in total darkness . An immunological trick that protects babies in the womb, and a neurological trick that lets the brain map out social relationships like physical landscapes. A simple mutation that transformed ants into complex social parasites virtually overnight, and a strategic demolition of DNA that worms use to safeguard their genomes.

Quanta chronicled all those and more this year, and as new breakthroughs in fundamental biology come to light in the years ahead, we will be there for them too.

University of Cambridge

Pushing the Bounds of Synthetic Life

In the same way that physical scientists build simple model systems as steppingstones to understanding more complex phenomena, some biologists prefer to learn how life works by creating simpler versions. This year they made progress on two fronts: on large scales, in creating “embryo models,” and on small scales, in studying the most minimal cell possible.

Embryo models, or synthetic embryos, are laboratory products of stem cells that can be induced to grow faithfully through the early stages of development, although they self-terminate before reenacting the full embryonic development process. They were devised as potential tools for the ethical experimental study of human development. This year, research groups in Israel and the United Kingdom showed that they could nurture embryo models all the way up through (and possibly beyond) the stage at which research on live human embryos is legally allowed. Researchers in China even briefly initiated pregnancies in monkeys with embryo models. Those successes are considered major breakthroughs for a technique that could help scientists answer important questions about prenatal development, and they might eventually pay off in preventing miscarriages and birth defects. At the same time, the experiments reawakened ethical arguments about this line of research, given that as the embryo models become more developmentally advanced, they can also start to seem more intrinsically deserving of protection.

Synthetic life isn’t always ethically contentious. This year, researchers tested the limits of “minimal” cells , simple organisms derived from bacteria that have been stripped down to their genomic bare bones. These minimal cells have the tools to reproduce, but any genes that aren’t otherwise essential have been removed. In an important validation of how naturally lifelike the minimal cells are, researchers discovered that this minimal genome was able to evolve and adapt. After 300 days of growth and natural selection in the lab, the minimal cells could successfully compete against the ancestral bacteria from which they were derived. The findings demonstrated the robustness of the rules of life — that even after being robbed of nearly every genetic resource, the minimal cells could use the tools of natural selection to recover into more successful life forms.

Señor Salme for Quanta Magazine

The Investigation of Consciousness

Consciousness is the feeling of being — the awareness of having a unique self, a picture of reality and a place in the world. It’s long been the terrain of philosophers, but recently scientists have made progress (of sorts) in understanding its neurobiological basis.

In an interview on the Joy of Why podcast released in May, the neuroscience researcher Anil Seth of the University of Sussex described consciousness as a kind of “ controlled hallucination , ” in that our experience of reality emerges from within us. None of us can directly know what the world is like; indeed, every organism (and individual) experiences the world differently. Our sense of reality is shaped by the sensory information we take in and the way our brain organizes it and constructs it in our consciousness. In that sense, our entire experience is a hallucination — but it is a controlled hallucination, the brain’s best-guess description of the immediate environment and larger world based on its memories and other encoded information.

Our minds are constantly taking in new external information and also creating their own internal imagery and narratives. How can we distinguish reality from fantasy? This year, researchers discovered that the brain has a “ reality threshold ” against which it constantly evaluates processed signals. Most of our mental images have a pretty weak signal, and so our reality threshold easily consigns them to the “fake” pile. But sometimes our perceptions and imagination can mix, and if those images are strong enough, we can get confused — potentially mistaking our hallucinations for real life.

How does consciousness emerge in the mind? Is it more about thinking, or is it a product of sensory experiences? This year, the results of a high-profile adversarial collaboration that pitted two major theories of consciousness against each other were announced. Over the course of five years, two teams of researchers — one representing global neuronal workspace theory, which focuses on cognition, and the other representing integrated information theory, which focuses on perception — co-created and then led experiments aimed at testing which theory’s predictions were more accurate. The results may have been a letdown for anyone hoping for definitive answers. Onstage in New York City, at the 26th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, the researchers acknowledged ways in which the experiments had challenged both theories and highlighted differences between them, but they declined to pronounce either theory the winner. However, the evening wasn’t entirely unsatisfying: The neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science conceded a 25-year-old bet with the philosopher David Chalmers of New York University that the neural correlates of consciousness would have been identified by now.

Harol Bustos for Quanta Magazine

New Ideas About Anguish

It’s often taken for granted that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain: specifically, a chronic deficiency of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that carries messages between nerve cells. Yet even though millions of depressed people around the world get relief from taking Prozac and the other drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, based on that theory, decades’ worth of neuropsychiatric research has failed to validate the assumptions of that model. The hum of scientific dissent has been growing louder: An international team of scientists screened more than 350 papers and found no convincing evidence that lower levels of serotonin are associated with depression.

The realization that serotonin deficiency may not be the cause is forcing researchers to fundamentally rethink what depression is. It’s possible that SSRIs alleviate some symptoms of depression by altering other chemicals or processes in the brain that are more direct causes of depression. It’s also possible that what we call “depression” encompasses a variety of disorders that manifest with a similar set of symptoms, including fatigue, apathy, changes in appetite, suicidal thoughts and sleep issues. If that’s the case, significant additional research will be needed to unpack this complexity — to differentiate the kinds and causes of depression and to develop better treatments.

Depression can be an isolating experience. But it is distinct from loneliness, an emotional condition that neuroscientists have better defined in recent years. Loneliness is not the same as social isolation, which is an objective measure of the number of relationships a person is in: Someone can be in many relationships and still be lonely. Nor is it social anxiety, which is a fear of relationships or of certain relational experiences.

Instead, a growing body of neurobiological research suggests that loneliness is a bias in the mind toward interpreting social information in a negative, self-punishing way. It’s as if a survival signal that evolved to urge us to reconnect with the people we rely on has short-circuited, creating a self-perpetuating loop of felt isolation. Scientists haven’t yet found a medical treatment for loneliness, but perhaps simply understanding that negative loop can help the chronically lonely to escape the cycle and find comfort in their existing connections or in new ones.

Andreas Klingl, Ludwig Maximilian University; modified by Quanta

The Origins of Complex Life

Where do we come from, and how did we get here? Those timeless questions could be answered in many ways, and they have set numerous biologists on a search for the origins of the eukaryotes — the 2-billion-year-old lineage of life that includes all animals, plants and fungi and many single-celled creatures more complex than bacteria.

The search for the first eukaryote has researchers painstakingly coaxing rare microbes from seafloor sludge. Recently, after six years of work, a European laboratory became only the second to successfully cultivate one of the Asgard archaea — a group of primitive single-celled organisms that have genomes with eyebrow-raising similarities to those of eukaryotes, and that are thought to be ancestral to them. Scientists hope that directly studying the cells in the lab will reveal new information about how eukaryotes evolved and edge us closer to understanding our origins.

The evolutionary journey of that first eukaryote is shrouded in mystery. This year, scientists found a way to fill in an 800-million-year gap in the molecular fossil record between the appearance of the earliest eukaryote and that of the most recent ancestor of all eukaryotes alive today. Previously, when seeking information about eukaryotes that lived in the blank space from roughly 800 million to 1.6 billion years ago, scientists couldn’t find the molecular fossils they expected. But when an Australian team tweaked their search filter to look for fossilized versions of more primitive molecules, they found them in abundance. The findings revealed what the authors call “a lost world” of eukaryotes that helps tell the story of the early evolutionary history of our ancient ancestors.

Tagide deCarvalho

Microbiomes Evolve With Us

Research over the last decade has better characterized the microbiome — the collection of microorganisms that live in our guts and elsewhere in our body — and the subtle ways in which it influences our health. This year, scientists revealed in the greatest detail yet where our microbiomes come from and how they evolve throughout our lives.

Unsurprisingly, the first seeds of our microbiome usually come from mom — transmitted during birth and also through breastfeeding. Research published this year found that a mother’s contributions aren’t only whole microbial organisms, but also small snippets of DNA called mobile genetic elements. Up through the first year of life, these mobile genetic elements hop from the mother’s bacteria to the baby’s through a process called horizontal gene transfer. The discovery surprised researchers, who didn’t expect the high degree of coevolution between the mother’s microbiome and the baby’s to go on for so long after birth.

That’s not the end of the story: The microbiome evolves throughout our lives. The largest analysis yet of human microbiome transmission, also published this year, revealed how microbiomes shuffle and reassemble over many decades. It provided clear evidence that microbiome organisms spread between people, especially those with whom we spend the most time, such as family members, partners and roommates. And the study raised the intriguing possibility that some illnesses considered noncommunicable might actually be transmissible, in sometimes subtle ways, through gut flora.

Carlos Arrojo for Quanta Magazine

How Life Keeps Time

Eons before the invention of sundials, watches and atomic clocks, organisms evolved biological tools to keep time. They need internal circadian clocks that can keep their metabolic processes in sync with the cycle of day and night, and also clocks akin to calendars to keep their developmental processes on track. This year, researchers made important advances in understanding both.

A flurry of research over the past several years, made possible by new stem cell technologies, has proffered new explanations for what’s known as developmental tempo. All vertebrates start life as a simple embryo — but the rate at which an embryo develops, and the timing of when its tissues mature, dramatically varies between species and determines their final form. What controls the ticking of the developmental clock? This year, a series of careful experiments in labs around the world, focusing on different species and systems, pointed to a common explanation: that fundamental metabolic processes, including biochemical reactions and the gene expression that underlies them, all set the pace. Those metabolic processes appear to be organized fundamentally by the mitochondria, which may very well serve dual roles as the complex cell’s timekeeper and power source.

While those researchers were scattered across the world, novel work on the circadian clock has been done in the lab of a single scientist: the biochemist Carrie Partch at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Partch is driven by a unique obsession not only with the basic steps of the clock, but also with the intricate dance that clock proteins perform as they are built and as they interact and degrade. Like any watchmaker, she isn’t satisfied with knowing what the gears and cogs are — she also needs to understand how they fit together. In paying such close attention to a single system over the course of her career, she has made discoveries about the dance of clock proteins that represent broader truths, for example that unstructured or even disordered proteins are fundamental to biological processes.

David Robertson, ICR / Science Source

Refining the Brain’s Complexity

One sign of the progress in neuroscience is that it grows continually more precise. Using new tools that are more firmly grounded in sound science, scientists can now focus their attention on defining the quirks of individual brain cells. This year they located the social map of bats, which turned out to be superimposed on the bats’ map of their physical environment — the same exact brain cells in the hippocampus encode multiple kinds of environmental information. Other researchers seem to have resolved a 30-year debate over whether some of the brain’s glial cells — historically considered to be barely more than padding for the more prestigious neurons — can stimulate electrical signals . A team of neuroscientists and clinical researchers, helped by epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted to improve their medical care, discovered that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers. And for the very first time, researchers visualized in three dimensions how an olfactory receptor grabs onto an odor molecule — a significant step in understanding how the nose and brain can intercept airborne chemicals and gain crucial sensory information about the environment.

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Browsing: Biology

Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms, encompassing various sub-disciplines such as microbiology, botany, zoology, and physiology. We’re dedicated to bringing you the latest research findings, innovative technologies, and thought-provoking discoveries from top scientists, research institutions, and universities around the world.

This section on biology news includes new research related to many related subjects such as biochemistry, genetics, cytology, and microbiology. Popular sub-topics include Biotechnology , DNA ,  Microbiology , Neurology , Evolutionary Biology , Genetics , Stem Cells , Neuroscience , Bioengineering , and Cell Biology .

Whether you are a professional biologist, an aspiring scientist, or simply someone with a passion for learning about the living world, our Biology News page offers a wealth of information and insights to keep you informed and inspired.

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How Looking Closely Led This Cell Biologist to World-Changing Breakthroughs

Hear Randy Schekman, a UC Berkeley professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, explain his Nobel Prize-winning work in just 101 seconds.

For Randy Schekman, a UC Berkeley professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, the study of life and basic research has been a calling since he first explored pond scum under a microscope as a boy.

“I loved looking closely at life and thinking about how it works. And I still do,” says Schekman in this 101 in 101 video, challenging him to explain the basics of his work in only 101 seconds. 

That love of looking closely and the deep study of cells, those of yeast in particular, led to Schekman’s  Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013.  

As he explains, the discovery of how yeast membranes work has led to advances in food and fuel production, as well as life-saving drugs and vaccines. 

Today, Schekman is looking into human cells for secrets that might someday lead to a way to stop Parkinson’s disease. With as many as 10 million people around the world suffering from the disorder — including his wife, who died from the disease — it’s critical work.

Click here to  watch previous 101 in 101 videos  from Berkeley News featuring psychologist Alison Gopnik and landscape architect Walter Hood.

• September 2024

An Ode to Stem Cells

Leveraging the versatility of stem cells allows researchers to advance science across multiple disciplines..

Meenakshi is the Editor-in-Chief at The Scientist. Her diverse science communication experience includes journalism, podcasting, and corporate content strategy. Meenakshi earned her PhD in biophysics from the University of Goettingen, Germany.

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U ntil a few hundred years ago, before scientific advances allowed researchers to peer inside the human body or extract cells to study them in the laboratory, I imagine that the mysteries of developmental biology—more than any other discipline—must have stumped humans. On one hand, one could visibly track a baby’s growth based on the size of the mother's growing bump; if everything went right, a healthy baby would emerge after nine months. On the other hand, sometimes a seemingly healthy mother lost her child mid-pregnancy or delivered an abnormal newborn. In the absence of scientific technologies to probe into the womb, the inner workings of embryonic development remained a black box and people had little to no way of knowing what to expect when someone was expecting. 

While several questions remain unanswered even today, scientists rapidly bridged most of the knowledge gaps once stem cell research entered the scene. You might recall that in our winter issue last year we covered how researchers used adult stem cells to better understand placental development . In one of the articles in this issue, we profile a biologist with expertise in endometrial research who found that stem cells were a powerful tool for solving long-standing mysteries about women's health.

While access to adult stem cells has certainly helped answer some questions in developmental biology, embryonic stem cell studies, in my opinion, truly transformed the research area. Just like the newborn that the embryo eventually forms into, these early-stage cells have the potential to choose any path of maturation. By developing 3D embryonic stem cell models, researchers study the differentiation and growth of these cells without worrying about the restrictive rules on embryo research (read more about these advances in one of the feature stories in this issue). What also fascinates me is that researchers can now achieve single cell resolution in their quest to determine how life develops early on; one research team recently found that the initial two cells in an embryo take diverse developmental paths . 1 These studies are a stark reminder that scientists have indeed come a long way from not knowing what happens during the months-long gestation period to following the development of two individual cells to determine their eventual contribution to structure and function!

In contrast to the early embryonic development studies inspired by visible signs, it must have been hard in those days to imagine problems within an individual’s brain when their symptoms did not match known physical disorders. Securing neurons from the brain is also not as easy as isolating most other cell types. It is no secret that the ability to transform normal cells into induced pluripotent stem cells revolutionized neuroscience, as researchers finally found a way to model brain disorders in these cells. Now with more knowledge about how sex affects disease, researchers are correcting the long-standing sex bias in the field to further refine our understanding of the human brain. For those interested in reading more about this topic, we dive into the measures that researchers are taking to include sex as a biological variable in their studies in a feature article in this issue. 

All in all, the applications of stem cells are as diverse as the cells’ differentiation abilities, and researchers have only scratched the surface so far. I hope you experience the same enthusiasm and excitement reading the stem cell stories in this issue that we had while crafting them. 

• Junyent S, et al. The first two blastomeres contribute unequally to the human embryo . Cell. 2024;187(11):2838-2854.

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Reconstitution Methods in Cell Biology

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Reconstitution of cellular phenomena is a powerful approach for investigating the biochemical and biophysical processes that sustain life. Cell-free reconstitution is the biologist’s equivalent of taking apart a radio and piecing it back together. By understanding how the component parts behave, we can more accurately determine how they drive essential cell functions. Cellular behavior emerges from a complex network of precisely organized biochemical reactions that can sometimes be re-created in the test tube, making it possible to directly study relationships between biomolecules including proteins, membranes, and nucleic acids. These approaches allow researchers to precisely manipulate these components in ways that are either impossible or extremely difficult in cells. The development of cell-free experimental tools has advanced our understanding of protein function, subcellular assemblies, membrane dynamics, genome organization, and more. Modern cell-free reconstitution approaches are highly interdisciplinary, bringing together researchers with expertise in biochemistry, biophysics, engineering, computational modeling, and cell biology. Collaboration between investigators with diverse perspectives drives new insight and leads to innovative experimental approaches that transform our understanding of cellular phenomena. These efforts have rapidly expanded the “scientific toolkit” for biochemical reconstitution experimentation. Therefore, we aim to highlight research and perspectives from researchers applying cross-disciplinary approaches to cell-free reconstitution systems. This Research Topic will showcase the diversity of reconstitution approaches currently being used to investigate fundamental cell biology. In this Research Topic, we aim to highlight new scientific understanding gained through biochemical reconstitution approaches. We invite primary data papers, perspectives, and reviews that address the following topics: ● Biological membranes ● Cytoskeletal assemblies and dynamics ● Self-organization and patterning ● Mechanisms of size and scaling ● Chromatin organization ● Reconstitution of prokaryotic systems ● Synthetic and artificial cells ● Bioengineering This list is not exhaustive and we welcome scholarly work relevant to the field of cell-free reconstitution.

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The USC COMPASS cohort. (Photo/Cristy Lytal)

USC COMPASS undergraduate program prepares juniors and seniors for stem cell careers

For 20 undergraduate students at USC, stem cell research is more than the topic of a lecture or an article in a textbook. It’s the focus of a comprehensive two-year program designed to prepare juniors and seniors for careers in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine.

Known as USC COMPASS: Creating Opportunities through Mentorship and Partnership Across Stem Cell Science, the program launched in summer 2023 as a multidisciplinary collaboration among three USC schools: the Keck School of Medicine, the Viterbi School of Engineering, and the Dornsife College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences.

The program is supported by a $2.9 million grant from the  California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) , the voter-created state agency that distributes public funding to support stem cell research and education. CIRM established a total of 16 COMPASS programs, including several at University of California, California State University, and community college campuses. USC is the only private research university to host a COMPASS program.

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• Denna sida på svenska
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Professor Ernest Arenas has passed away

Ernest Arenas, professor at Karolinska Institutet, passed away on September 15th at the age of 62. Dr. Arenas was widely known both within and outside Sweden as one of the pioneers in Parkinson’s disease research, with a strong commitment to developing better treatment strategies through cell replacement therapy.

Ernest Arenas was born on June 13, 1962, in Lleida, Spain. Dr. Arenas studied medicine at the University of Barcelona, where he graduated in 1986. He continued as a doctoral student and completed his PhD on neurotransmission in the basal ganglia in 1991 at the University of Barcelona. The basal ganglia are affected in neurological diseases, particularly movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

At that time, molecular biology enabled new types of research in neuroscience. These technologies allowed for rapid and reliable mapping of gene expression within complex tissues, genetic engineering of cells, and many other new ways to study physiology and pathophysiology, leading to new insights into disease mechanisms. Ernest Arenas recognized these opportunities and joined one of the leading labs in Europe as a postdoctoral fellow, Håkan Persson’s research group at the Department of Molecular Neurobiology at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics (MBB), Karolinska Institutet. An important type of neurons that control the internal function of the basal ganglia are dopaminergic neurons in the brain. His postdoctoral work focused on mechanisms to protect these neurons through neurotrophic factors in animal models of Parkinson’s disease.

Replacement Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease 

Parkinson’s disease is a very common neurodegenerative disease. Therapies for Parkinson’s disease neither cure nor slow the disease. Clinical trials have shown that it is possible to transplant and replace brain cells lost to the disease with fetal cells, but this approach involves several technical and ethical challenges that limit its use. Dr. Arenas was incredibly foresighted and understood the potential of stem cell research even when it was in its infancy. He was convinced that knowledge about the development of dopaminergic cells could provide the necessary insight to recreate lost nerve cells for clinical use, leading to a curative therapy for Parkinson’s disease.

Pioneering Research on Dopaminergic Neurons 

In 1994, Dr. Arenas received a position as an associate professor from the Medical Research Council, and in 1998, he was appointed associate professor at Karolinska Institutet. Since 2002, he was professor of stem cell neurobiology. He remained at the Department of Molecular Neurobiology at MBB throughout his scientific career, conducting internationally leading research on the developmental processes of dopaminergic neurons. He used these insights to develop methods to reprogram human stem cells for cell replacement therapy for Parkinson’s disease. He contributed several groundbreaking discoveries, including identifying Nurr1 as a critical transcription factor that can reprogram cells to become dopaminergic, how astrocytes in the living brain can be redirected to become dopaminergic cells, and the creation of protocols for differentiating human pluripotent stem cells into dopaminergic cells for transplantation.

A Colleague Who Will Be Missed 

Dr. Arenas’ research stood out even as a young scientist; he received the award for best thesis at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Barcelona (Spain), in 1991. Over the years, he received many national and international awards, including the Juan Negrin award, INGVAR award, Wallenberg Scholar and project grants, European Research Council senior grants, Michael J. Fox Foundation, and several others. Dr. Arenas supervised 13 doctoral students and 35 postdoctoral fellows who have made strong careers in academic research and related professional fields.

As a young scientist during his postdoctoral training, he also had to take on responsibilities that were unusual at that career stage. Shortly after arriving at the Department of Molecular Neurobiology, his supervisor Håkan Persson passed away. In 1996, Dr. Arenas and Dr. Ernfors were appointed research group leaders at the Department of Molecular Neurobiology. With a shared vision of how to create a vibrant and exciting research environment, the division has been successful. Dr. Arenas leaves behind an internationally leading research environment, which today houses more than a hundred researchers.

In addition to his contributions to science and his local environment, Dr. Arenas was very active in academic commissions of trust, organizing several meetings and conferences, university advisory roles, co-director of strategic research at KI, head of MBB, and member of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.

Patrik Ernfors, Goncalo Castelo-Branco, Per Uhlén, Sten Linnarsson, Ulrika Marklund, Jens Hjerling-Leffler, Onur Dagliyan, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Karolinska Institutet

The Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Unit of Molecular Neurobiology are organizing a gathering in memory of Ernest, that will take place at the coffee area of the C6 quarter at Biomedicum, Thursday 19th September at 13.00-15.00.

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