Science Award for Max Planck Director Elena Conti
The Gregori Aminoff Prize was awarded at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science's annual celebration. This year's awardees are RNA researchers Elena Conti, Patrick Cramer and Seth Darst. Conti, director and head of the research department "Structural Cell Biology" at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, together with her colleagues from the MPI for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany, and the Rockefeller University in New York, USA, studied the cellular systems for RNA synthesis and degradation, the two processes that together regulate the lifetime of RNA molecules. RNAs are key macromolecules that are found in all living organisms and in many viruses. Conti's work focuses on the quality control and degradation of RNA. She has studied how RNA is transformed from non-functional to functional molecules, and how, finally, they are broken down when they are no longer needed or when they are found to be defective. She has focused on the exosome, which performs several of these tasks. Her results have been highly influential and encouraged many other researchers to try new approaches.