Month: July 2025

The Pettenkofer Prize 2025 on the topic “Modulation of the innate immune system by effector molecules of pathogenic bacteria” goes to

Professor Dr. Teresa Thurston, Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK

 With this email and the attached flyer, we would like to cordially invite you, also on behalf of Mr Stadtdirektor Stefan Eckhardt, Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Pettenkofer Foundation, to the festive award ceremony on 10 November 2025 at 5:00 p.m. in the Großer Sitzungssaal of the New City Hall at Marienplatz in Munich (entrance in the middle of Marienplatz). Following the official part of the ceremony, there will be an opportunity for discussion at a reception with snacks.

Please let us know by November 3  if you would like to attend. Please send an e-mail to pettenkoferpreis@mvp.lmu.de or call +49 89 2180- 72805.

 We are very much looking forward to seeing you again and would like to thank the Roche company for providing the prize money and supporting the award ceremony. We hope to receive many registrations from you.

With kind regards

Professor Sebastian Suerbaum and Professor Oliver T. Keppler 

Invitation Flyer

New Publication in mBio

Bacterial epigenetics and novel functions controlled by DNA methylation are an emerging topic in infection research. The research group led by Prof. Dr. Sebastian Suerbaum, with shared first authors Wilhelm Gottschall and Dr. Florent Ailloud, in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Christine Josenhans, investigated the function of the conserved methyltransferase M.Hpy99XIX in Helicobacter pylori that recognizes and methylates the motif ATTAAT. The stomach bacterium H. pylori is one of the most versatile infectious agents, using bacterial epigenetics and DNA methylation for diverse purposes, yet the diverse functions remain poorly understood. Now, the researchers found that ATTAAT methylation is heavily involved in genome-wide bacterial gene regulation. Particularly iron/metal-ion homeostasis, which is extremely important in the restricted habitat of the human stomach, is maintained and regulated by the specific MTase. Intriguingly, the group also collected evidence that two separately evolved branches of H. pylori, isolated from human patients with different, omnivorous (ubiquitous) or carnivorous (hardy) lifestyles, have either adopted the MTase function for regulating ion homeostasis, under rather iron-restricted living conditions, or have evolved other pathways, without this regulatory MTase, to cope with nutrition conditions of frequent metal ion surplus.

These findings underscore the importance of epigenetic regulation in bacterial physiology and support a role for methylome diversity and flexibility in the ecological divergence of H. pylori subtypes.

The full article is freely available  at: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01209-25