Cheng Gong Awarded the 2026 Beutenberg Campus Young Scientist Award
Excellent research is promoted and rewarded at Beutenberg Jena
On May 20, 2026, the Beutenberg-Campus Jena e.V. presented its science awards at the Beutenberg Campus in Jena. This year’s awards recognized research on the selective signaling behavior of G-protein-coupled receptors, the impact of anthropogenic nitrogen compounds on the global climate, and a significantly faster method for detecting microbial antibiotic resistance.
Once a year, the top researchers at Beutenberg are honored with the “Life Sciences and Physics” research awards presented by Beutenberg-Campus Jena e.V. in three categories. This year, the Dissertation Award went to Edda Matthees from the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology at the University Hospital Jena (UKJ). Cheng Gong from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry was awarded the Young Scientist Award. On behalf of their team, Anne-Sophie Munser from Fraunhofer-IOF, Marc Thilo Figge and Miriam Agler-Rosenbaum from Leibniz-HKI, and Elke Müller from Leibniz-IPHT accepted the award for outstanding interdisciplinary collaboration.
In her work, Edda Matthees addressed a methodological question regarding the signal transduction of G-protein-coupled receptors, specifically the mechanism of selective signaling behavior, known as “biased signaling.” This issue is of high clinical relevance, as more than 30 percent of all medications in use exert their effects via such receptors, but can also produce undesirable effects if signaling pathways are misdirected. Matthees’s doctoral thesis demonstrates that two signaling pathways previously considered independent are inextricably intertwined via the so-called G-protein-coupled receptor kinases (GRKs). At the same time, a framework was developed that outlines which experiments must be conducted to identify a receptor’s potential for “biased signaling” early in drug development.
Cheng Gong investigated how anthropogenic nitrogen compounds have altered the carbon and nitrogen cycles and, consequently, the global climate. Nitrogen has been produced industrially and applied as fertilizer since the beginning of the 20th century. Through overfertilization and combustion processes, it enters the environment, leading to eutrophication, soil acidification, and health and climate impacts. For example, nitrous oxide, N2O, or laughing gas, escapes from fertilized soils; it is a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than CO2 and significantly more persistent. Gong was the first to calculate the overall impact of anthropogenic nitrogen compounds on a global scale: While nitrous oxide warms the atmosphere, other nitrogen compounds have a cooling effect through the formation of aerosols and the stimulation of plant growth. Overall, Gong found that despite the far-reaching negative environmental impacts of anthropogenic nitrogen compounds, the cooling effects on the climate slightly outweigh them.
Martina Graf, working with an interdisciplinary team of scientists from the Leibniz-HKI, the Fraunhofer-IOF, and the Leibniz-IPHT, innovatively combined expertise in microbiology, biotechnology, photonics, and bioinformatics to develop a novel high-throughput platform that enables the rapid and reliable detection of antibiotic resistance in microorganisms. Conventional methods for antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) are based on the cultivation of bacteria in the presence of antibiotics. While these methods are reliable, they typically take 8 to 20 hours. For patients, this waiting time can lead to inappropriate (clinical) treatment and an increased mortality rate. The newly developed high-throughput platform enables the diagnosis of resistance within 1 to 2 hours and thus holds great potential for clinical use in quickly and specifically selecting suitable antibiotics for patient treatment.
Joint press release from Beutenberg-Campus Jena e.V., Leibniz-HKI, MPI for Biogeochemistry, and the Center for Molecular Biomedicine (CMB)
