Press release: Out of the Excellence Strategy competition

No. 86 - 22.05.2025

Funding for the Multiscale Bioimaging Cluster of Excellence will not be extended

The University of Göttingen has been turned down for the Excellence Strategy of the German national and state governments: funding for the Multiscale Bioimaging (MBExC) Cluster of Excellence will not be extended. This was announced by the Excellence Commission, the joint committee of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Science and Humanities Council (WR), together with the national and state ministers responsible for science and research. The application for MBExC was the last one from the University of Göttingen in the current round of the competition. Five new draft applications were turned down in the preliminary selection last year.

“We are deeply disappointed by the decision not to extend funding for this Cluster of Excellence,” said University President Professor Axel Schölmerich. "In our view, MBExC has fulfilled the high expectations placed on it in the first funding phase, for which I would like to express my sincere thanks to everyone involved. We will now await the reasons for the decision and then consider together how we can continue the research themes we have started here at the Göttingen Campus."

“This decision came as a great surprise to us and is difficult to understand,” said Professor Wolfgang Brück, Chair for the Executive Board and Executive Vice President for Research and Teaching at the University Medical Centre Göttingen (UMG). "We deeply regret the end of funding for MBExC, but will now do everything in our power to find solutions to continue the research and further develop promising new therapeutic approaches. We would like to thank all the scientists involved for their great commitment over the years."

“This is a very disappointing decision that, to me, seems incomprehensible,” said MBExC spokesperson Professor Tobias Moser, Director of the Institute of Auditory Neuroscience at the UMG. “MBExC is a successful joint project in every respect, which has produced innovative research and therapeutic approaches and opened up new fields of research.”

Active since 2019, the Cluster of Excellence “Multiscale Bioimaging: From Molecular Machines to Networks of Excitable Cells (MBExC)” has developed and combined innovative methods to better understand the fundamental biological processes of the heart and brain. Heart and brain diseases are the most common caus-es of death. The aim is to investigate the disease-relevant properties of electrically excitable heart and nerve cells across multiple time and length scales (molecules, cells, organs) and to identify functional disorders. The findings will form the basis for the development of new strategies for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of the heart, the brain or both.

In the first funding phase, MBExC made significant progress in optical nanoscopy, cryo-electron tomogra-phy, X-ray imaging, Light sheet microscopy, ultrasound imaging, and optogenetics. This brought a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of heart and brain function and dysfunction, as well as their interaction. MBExC has developed new therapeutic approaches, attracted outstanding scientists to the Göttingen Campus and created infrastructure. The Hertha Sponer College enables MBExC interdisciplinary training and career development for researchers in the early stages of their careers.

The current spokespersons for the Cluster are Professor Tobias Moser (Auditory Neuroscience, UMG), Professor Claudia Steinem (Faculty of Chemistry, Göttingen University), and Professor Christian Griesinger (Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences).

Further information can be found at https://mbexc.de.