News from the Göttingen Campus

Göttingen researchers unravel fundamental communication processes in proteins
Proteins are essential for every living cell and responsible for many fundamental processes. In particular, they are required as bio-catalysts in metabolism and for signalling inside the cell and between cells. Many diseases come about as a result of failures in this communication, and the origins of signalling in proteins have been a source of great scientific debate. Now, for the first time, a team of researchers at the University of Göttingen…
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Welcome Centre collaborates with Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry
The Welcome Centre for the Göttingen Campus and the Südniedersachsen region continues to work hard to strengthen sustainable collaboration with its existing project partners. As a result, the University of Göttingen, as the sponsor of the Welcome Centre of the Göttingen Campus, has now agreed a cooperation agreement with the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. In the future, researchers at the MPI will be able to…
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Max Planck School brings the best young minds to Göttingen
Launch of the new "Matter to Life" programme in Göttingen. Students with an excellent bachelor's degree will receive special support at the three Max Planck Schools "Matter to Life", "Photonics" and "Cognition". (in German)
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Göttingen University leads European World Humanities Report for UNESCO
Since April 2019, the University of Göttingen has been coordinating a European research team preparing the European part of the World Humanities Report (WHR) for UNESCO. From this summer, the Volkswagen Foundation has supported the project with around 244,000 euros, for one year in the first instance. The WHR provides insights into current developments in the humanities and forms the basis for future UNESCO recommendations. "This report…
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Collaborative research led by Göttingen investigates new ways of pasture management
Modern livestock farming increases the pressure to use arable land for fodder production. The result: modern dairy farms no longer send their cows out to pasture. The "Green Grass" project, led by the University of Göttingen, brings researchers, industry and stakeholders together in an interdisciplinary network stretching across Germany. They are investigating how grazing livestock can be brought back into the landscape and finding new ways of…
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A team of neuroscientists from Göttingen and Tehran shows how our brain combines visual features to achieve a unified percept
Imagine that you are watching a crowded hang-gliding competition, keeping track of a red and orange glider’s skillful movements. Our brain uses separate circuits to achieve such outstanding tracking ability, one specialized to process color information and the other specialized for processing directions of motion. This allows for optimal perceptual performance, but how do we perceptually combine the color and direction information into our…
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Göttingen researchers develop a new method allowing ten-fold improvement in optical resolution
Researchers at the University of Göttingen have developed a new method that takes advantage of the unusual properties of graphene to electromagnetically interact with fluorescing (light-emitting) molecules. This method allows scientists to optically measure extremely small distances, in the order of 1 ångström (one ten-billionth of a meter) with high accuracy and reproducibility for the first time. This enabled researchers to optically measure…
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Researchers from Göttingen, Heidelberg and Zurich studied how cattle breed affects plant composition
Angus, or Highland Cattle: not all cows are the same when it comes to a preference for different herbaceous, grass and shrub species. Research carried out the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen in collaboration with the Swiss institute of Agroscope shows that cattle breed influences the botanical composition of pasture.  The results were recently published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment. It is well known that by…
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Göttingen research confirms hypotheses on the complexity of commerce over 3,000 years ago
People in England were using balance weights and scales to measure the value of materials as early as the late second and early first millennia BC. This is what Professor Lorenz Rahmstorf, scientist at the University of Göttingen and project manager of the ERC "Weight and Value" project, has discovered. He compared Middle and Late Bronze Age gold objects from the British Isles and Northern France and found that they were based on the same unit of…
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International team led by Göttingen University discovers function of opsin protein outside vision
The function of the visual photopigment rhodopsin and its action in the retina to facilitate vision is well understood. However, there remain questions about other biological functions of this family of proteins (opsins) and this has ramifications for our understanding of several evolutionary pathways. Now, an international research team led by the University of Göttingen has shown there are other functions of opsin outside vision and this…
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