Molecular biologist Elke Deuerling from the University of Konstanz receives the Dr. K. H. Eberle Prize 2026, worth 100,000 euros. The funding will support a basic research project that takes a fresh look at the origins of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and explores new avenues for their treatment.

Researchers have created a large, openly available neuroimaging resource from more than 24,000 MRI scans of over 10,000 adolescents, providing an unprecedented view of how the brain’s wiring develops during adolescence. Using advanced, open-source image processing methods, the team identified highly consistent patterns of development across 21 study sites, despite differences in scanner technology and image quality

By filming skin stem cells in living mice over five months, researchers at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, have discovered that in females these cells renew the skin in a more coordinated way than in males.

Coral bleaching occurs when heat stress from warm ocean waters causes corals to expel their symbiotic dinoflagellate algae, and is a major cause of global coral reef decline. Now, Daniel Collins and colleagues have demonstrated that brief physical contact between healthy and bleached coral can restore algae to the bleached coral, leading to their full recovery. Just one week – and sometimes as little as three days – is enough to trigger this transformation. The algal recovery time is an order of magnitude faster than most recovery times in the wild, which in some cases can be too slow to prevent reef death. Collins et al. show that the algal transfer happens via tissue fusion between the corals, and as a result, the procedure is only successful for corals from the same genetic background (or genet). The researchers found that symbiont algae transfer via the uptake of polyps occurs upon contact in both same-genet and mixed-genet pairings, “revealing an additional, slower pathway for symbiont transfer that is insufficient on its own to support colony recovery,” they write. They note that the next step will be to see whether these contact-based recovery strategies can be applied in the field at the scale of natural coral reefs.