Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators 2024

The award is given to Dr. Clemens Plaschka (IMP – Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna, Austria). Clemens studied biochemistry at Imperial College London. He carried out his doctoral studies on mRNA transcription with Patrick Cramer (Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences) and obtained his PhD in 2015 from the University of Munich. For his postdoctoral studies he joined Kiyoshi Nagai’s group in 2016 at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, where he studied precursor mRNA splicing. In 2018 he became a Group Leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna. His lab uses structural, biochemical, and functional methods to study how messenger RNA is made and regulated at different stages of its life cycle. He received the Kulturpreis Bayern (2015) and Otto-Hahn Medal (2016) for his PhD thesis, an EMBO long-term fellowship during his postdoc (2016), an ERC Starting Grant in 2020, and an EMBO Young Investigator Program award in 2022.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) carries genetic information from DNA to protein, a process that is essential for cellular life. Although this pathway has been known for sixty years, the molecular mechanisms that control how a human mRNA is made remain incompletely understood. Each of step in this process requires a dedicated macromolecular ‘machine’ that acts on the mRNA. Only when all steps are completed, can the mRNA move from the cell’s DNA compartment, the nucleus, into the protein production compartment, the cytoplasm. To understand how a healthy human cell functions, our research group aims to unravel the mechanistic steps that govern the production, processing, and nuclear export of human mRNA.

In our recent, work we contributed to a better understanding of how mRNA is modified by one molecular machine, the ‘Spliceosome’, and how mRNA is recognized and packaged for nuclear export by a second molecular machine, the ‘Transcription-Export complex’. This last step requires the precise discrimination of mRNA from its immature precursor forms. In recent work, we used structural techniques to visualize the ‘Transcription-Export complex’ in complex with human mRNAs at near-atomic detail. We learned that mRNA recognition and its packaging require many of the same type of molecules to bind special markers on the mRNA’s surface. We also observed how human mRNAs are organized in three-dimensions, which gave us insights into how these molecules might be safe-guarded in the cell and directed towards protein production. These findings open up exciting questions for the future about the mechanism by which human mRNAs are made and destroyed in healthy cells.