ERC starting grant awarded to László Nagy, from the Biological Research Center in Szeged

6 September, 2017

Dr. László Nagy was awarded an ERC starting grant (up to 1.5M euros) by the European Research Council, that will support new projects in the Fungal Genomics and Evolution Lab in the Synthetic and Systems Biology Unit, Biological Research Center in Szeged. The research group will examine the genetic mechanisms underpinning the evolution of multicellularity and more broadly that of organismal complexity.

They will address broad questions that have motivated biologists ever since Darwin published the theory of evolution. These questions now become testable in the so-called post-genomic era, when whole genome sequencing and genome-based biological datasets become widely available.

The research team builds on such resources in the fungal kingdom through new bioinformatic methods they developed recently and will combine these with experimental approaches to understand how multicellular fungi emerged during evolution. The anticipated results will both contribute to understanding some of the biggest questions in biology and to building a resource-base that can be deployed for applied research, such as fungal biotechnology.

The research group will continue research started in the framework of a grant by the Momentum Program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to László Nagy and an ERC_HU grant that facilitated the preparation of the ERC proposal.

According to the ERC, there have been 406 winners of Starting Grants this year. Among others, Bodó Balázs (media researcher) who works in the Netherlands , Edina Rosta (chemist) who is conducting her research in the UK and László Végh (mathematician) also based in the UK.