Markus Weingarth receives prestigious ICMRBS Founders' Medal

Recently, Dr. Markus Weingarth from the Utrecht University Bijvoet Centre received the prestigious ICMRBS Founders' Medal for his ground-breaking research into the killing mechanisms of new antibiotics!

This ICMRBS Founders' Medal is awarded biennially by the International Council of Magnetic Resonance in Biological Systems to talented young scientists who already accomplished landmark scientific breakthroughs in developing NMR techniques.

By developing new solid-state NMR techniques, Markus and his team try to understand the functional mechanisms of certain antibiotics at the resolution of individual atoms. Their results are very promising for the development of a new generation of antibiotics for combating bacteria that become increasingly drug-resistant. Remarkably, earlier in 2022 Markus was awarded also an ERC Consolidator Grant, and his work invariably leads to important scientific publications.

Like so much of the other structural biology research that is continuously conducted by our high-end facilities and users of their access services and experts, part of the studies described in Weingarth's recent Nature paper were indeed made possible through EC-funded iNEXT-Discovery.

iNEXT-Discovery fostered the long-term collaboration between the Utrecht (NL) and Florence (IT) NMR groups that resulted in this impressive public-private collaboration that includes also several external biochemistry, biophysics and chemistry groups. Together they showed the mode of action for the novel antibiotic Teixobactin to kill bacteria!

Dr. Markus Weingarth receiving from committee chair Mei Hong the Founders' Medal for his great work to understand the mechanisms of new antibiotics to kill bacteria.