The Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) promotes fundamental research in the life sciences with special emphasis on novel and interdisciplinary research, international and in particular intercontintental collaboration and support for young investigators. One of the mechanisms of research support is the Young Investigator Grants Program. Vladimír Sychrovský from Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry AS CR obtained that grant for his project Probing the mechanism of the cleavage reaction in catalytic RNAs and will cooperate with scientists from Japan and USA. and Libuše Marková.
In this issue, we feature an interview with the president of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (AS CR), Prof. Jiří Drahoš. The interview focuses on funding science and research at AS CR and the methodology that has become the universal tool for distributing money to the whole Czech science as a whole. On the basis of this government-conceived tool, the institutional financial grant for the AS CR should be reduced by about 50 percent by 2012. and Marina Hužvárová.
The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometers of the world´s most powerful particle accelerator on September 10. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery. and Jiří Niederle.
Plant virology department of the Institute of Plant Molecular Biology, Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, is successful in description and sequencing of mycoviruses and plant viruses, recently. Most of the newly described viruses have unique genome organization and did not induce disease symptoms in their plant of fungal hosts, respectively. By contrast, some mycoviruses debilitate their hosts and are promising as tools for biological control of harmful fungi. and Karel Petrzik, Ondřej Lenz.