Every year, the Vienna BioCenter PhD Symposium brings together life scientists from around the world. As part of the symposium, the annual Vienna BioCenter PhD awards recognize the most outstanding doctoral theses. This year, Eva Kroetenheerdt and Julia Kober were recognized with the "Out of the Box" Award for proposing a highly original approach to investigate a long-standing question in kinase biology: Can kinases autophosphorylate in cis?

To address this question, Julia and Eva will employ a novel method that uses DNA origami to create single-molecule reaction chambers, thus going beyond traditional bulk kinase assays. The DNA origami-based cage will be developed in collaboration with Florian Praetorius’s group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, and the proof-of-principle experiments will be performed on the MARS1 kinase. Eva and Julia convinced the jury that their highly creative and cross-institute collaboration has the potential to lead to high-impact discoveries. If successful, their proposed approach could be applied to investigate the mechanism of action of other important proteins that catalyze essential reactions in our cells.

Congratulations, Julia and Eva!