News

In October 2025, Claudia Höbartner presented invited lectures at ChemBioParis 2025 and the ACS Global Scientific Conference at IIT Bombay.

Claudia Höbartner, Manisha Walunj, and Sarah Christopher presented their latest research findings at the 13th Meeting of the GBM Study Section “RNA Biochemistry” & Workshop “Frontiers in RNA Chemical Biology.”

With their poster "The Synthetic Life of Modified tRNAs", Eva and Julia convinced the jury at the first symposium "Interconnections and Cross-Regulation of Gene Expression Processes" and were honored for their outstanding work.

As an invited speaker, Claudia Höbartner was accompanied by PhD students Tina Jungnickel, Nikolas Farn, and Konstantin Isenberg, who presented their current research work in poster presentations at the XIIth Nucleic Acid Chemistry Meeting of the DNG in Hamburg.

Claudia Höbartner and Julia Dietzsch attended the “Methods and Applications in Fluorescence” (MAF 2025) conference, which took place in Montreal from August 24 to 27. Claudia was an invited speaker and Julia was selected to give a talk in a session on fluorescent nucleic acids chaired by Yitzhak Tor.

Congratulations to Dr. Martin Volek for receiving the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship! Martin will carry out his research project in the Höbartner group and focus on the in vitro selection of new nucleic acid catalysts for epigenetic research.

We are happy to introduce our new group members Saumya Kumar Gupta and Anjan Pal. Welcome to the University of Würzburg and good luck for your PhD projects!

Our RNAmed PhD students, Arpan Banerjee and Dominik Rappert, accompanied by Claudia Höbartner, took part in the RNAmed retreat from July 2 to 5 on the beautiful island of San Servolo in Venice, Italy.

Martin Volek received the 2nd place in the Sanofi Award in Pharmacy for his doctoral project. Congratulations!

Riboknights participated in this year's soccer tournament of the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy.

Hermann Neitz was selected to give a talk on light-induced crosslinking of DNA, Evengiia Dorinova presented a poster on RNA-alkylating ribozymes, Claudia Höbartner gave a talk about structures, mechanisms and applications of MTR1 and SAMURI, and Martin Volek presented results from his PhD on the Aurora deoxyribozyme.

Our two teams were both successful. Congratulations!

A cordial welcome to our new postdoc Dr. Martin Volek from the Czech Republic.

Arpan Banerjee, one of our PhD students received the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (BIF) PhD Fellowship.

From 25.02. – 28.02.2025, four months after the official start of the International Research Group 2991, the involved PIs and PhD students from India and Germany came together on the beautiful campus of IISER Thiruvananthapuram for a Start-up Meeting.