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.
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.
CEFRES Platform and its new premises within the Czech Academy of Sciences were inaugurated on October 7-8, 2015. In 2015, theCAS built a brand newlibrary in order to hostCEFRES’smore than 6,000 volumes alongwith its teamand Prague’s Francophone readers. The new library was inaugurated during a ceremony in the presence of French Ambassador Jean-Pierre Asvazadourian, President of CAS Jiří Drahoš and Rector of Charles University Tomáš Zima. CEFRES (French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences) was founded in Prague in 1991 with the aim to restart scientific exchanges between France and Central Europe as the latter underwent major changes after the fall of communism. One of CEFRES’s tasks since then has been to build up a network of research teams between France, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. and Luděk Svoboda.