Nadine Ziemert receives Volkswagen Foundation Momentum grant

A pipeline for predicting and synthesizing new antibiotics

How can new antibiotics be discovered more quickly? This is the question at the heart of CMFI Borad Member Nadine Ziemert's Momentum project. With the project “A machine learning-driven pipeline for the prediction and production of new antibiotics”, she aims to systematically and efficiently accelerate the search for urgently needed bioactive compounds against pathogenic bacteria. The project will receive around 940,000 euros.

Bacteria naturally produce a variety of chemical compounds, called secondary metabolites or natural products. These compounds are used by bacteria to sense and respond to their environment. From a human perspective, they represent an important reservoir for the development of new therapeutics – especially in light of the growing resistance of many pathogens to existing antibiotics. Although advances in genomics and improved sequencing technologies have enabled researchers to identify some promising compounds, many others remain undiscovered because they are either not produced under standard laboratory conditions or originate from unculturable microorganisms.

Nadine Ziemert uses the latest methods in microbiology and bioinformatics to further develop genome mining approaches. The aim is to correlate genetically encoded biosynthetic pathways with potential target molecules in pathogens in order to predict and produce new natural products. To do this, she combines machine learning algorithms with methods from the fields of synthetic biology and molecular biology.

Three successes for the University of Tübingen

The University of Tübingen has this year achieved a triple success in acquiring Momentum funding from the Volkswagen Foundation for the newly appointed professors Rosa Lozano-Durán from the Center for Plant Molecular Biology, Marcus Scheele from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, and Nadine Ziemert from the Interfaculty Institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine.

The two other funding recipients deal with:

• Learning from proteins: Improving quantum dot light sources

Marcus Scheele is seeking ways to generate highly ordered supercrystals of colloidal quantum dots that can be used as light sources. His Momentum project is entitled “Advancing Quantum Dot Lightsources by Learning from Proteins” (QuantumLeaP).

• Insight into the infection process: How viruses reorganize the cell nucleus

Rosa Lozano-Durán will use her Momentum grant to take a very close look inside infected cells in the “NEWCLEAR – Understanding the viral subversion of the nucleus” project.

Momentum grants

The Volkswagen Foundation's Momentum funding line is aimed at academics in all disciplines in the first three to five years after taking up their first tenured professorship. The highly endowed funding is intended to open up potential for new thinking in research and teaching at universities. The funding goes to projects aimed at further developing the respective professorship both strategically and in content. The Volkswagen Foundation chose the term “momentum” because it means a decisive instant as well as the magnitude and direction of an impulse.

The Volkswagen Foundation supports professors in the first years of their appointment with its Momentum funding program for recently tenured professors. The grant gives them scope to further develop their research long term, or to tackle new topics. The highly endowed grants run for four years. They may be extended for a further two years. The Volkswagen Foundation approved just eleven Momentum grants across Germany this year.

“It is a mark of success that three researchers have received the Volkswagen Foundation’s prestigious and highly endowed Momentum funding for their first professorship at the University of Tübingen,” says University president, Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. (Dōshisha) Karla Pollmann. “This approval of applications from a wide range of disciplines shows once again that the University is strongly positioned across a wide range of topics.”

(Text/Source: According to a press release of the University of Tübingen, 13.05.2025)