Research News

An Australian spider has developed a hunting technique that is unique to the animal kingdom. It uses the aggression of its prey to trigger a high-performing snare – shooting ants into its web with enormous force. These are the findings of a joint team of researchers from the University of Greifswald…

Petrus Wickerau’s twenty-five words are among the oldest surviving texts written in Old Prussian. When the manuscript was discovered and published in 2013, Baltic scholars hailed it as a sensation. Source material on Old Prussian is scarce; every new find has a great significance. The…

A research team belonging to the University of Greifswald’s Research Training Group RTG-PRO “Proteases in pathogen and host: importance in infection and inflammation” has discovered a new mechanism with which bacterial pathogens adjust their activity to the metabolism of infected host cells.…

In an Israeli-German collaborative project, researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheba and the University of Greifswald have discovered a mechanism that explains how microorganisms successfully coexist in complex communities: they specifically adapt their protein production to…

It has only taken a few decades: the wasp spider (Argiope bruennichi) has expanded its range from the Mediterranean region to northern Europe – even as far as southern Finland. In so doing, it has adapted much faster genetically than previously thought possible. This is shown in the results of a…

It is unpleasant, strange and often comes as a surprise: shame. But why do we feel it? An international study that involved researchers from the University of Greifswald has shed new light on the emotion of shame that has long been considered harmful. The conclusion: shame is not merely an…

The amount of light in the sea is changing. Coasts shine brighter, the water is getting murkier. What is barely visible to swimmers has a huge effect on algae, fish and plankton. The international research project ISOLUME (IndicatorS Of changing Lightscapes in Underwater Marine Ecosystems)…

Giant dragonfly-like insects with wingspans of up to 70 centimetres that lived around 300 million years ago have fascinated researchers for decades. They have investigated how such giants were able to fly at all. A new study with the participation of the University of Greifswald now questions a…

Two innovative collaborative research projects, which are funded within the framework of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s State Excellence Initiative, started at the University of Greifswald on 1 April 2026. The two projects ‘BehAIve’ and ‘PIRATE’ will use cutting-edge methods and artificial intelligence…

How can useful information be drawn from large amounts of genomic data? This question is at the heart of PD Dr. Katharina Hoff’s work at the University of Greifswald. Her research aims to improve the automatic prediction of genes in genomes with the help of machine-learning processes. With the…