All people are different, so even people with the same genetic disorders may or may not develop the disease. The same medication can affect two people differently. Aušra Sasnauskienė, Doctor of Biochemistry, is trying to find out what then happens at the level of cells. “A cell is the smallest unit of life. By studying it, we also learn about life,” says the researcher.

"We see the greatest progress in the Vilnius University Life Sciences Center, it is the most international, and it attracts not only researchers from Lithuania but also foreigners" - says the Vice Minister of Education, Science and Sports Justas Nugaras.

Imagine a city with a lot of things to transport. A product is produced in one place and needed in another. In a city, goods are transported by trucks. Cells are also like a big busy microscopic city where intracellular vesicles with proteins, hormones, neurotransmitters etc. are transported. Only here, the transport function is carried out by molecular motors, of which there are thousands in each of our cells. “Every car in a city is driven by a human being, they have a driving licence, they obey the traffic rules, they know what cargo they are carrying and where it needs to be delivered. But who ‘drives’ the molecular motors?”, asks Dr Algirdas Toleikis, a biochemist and biophysicist who studies what happens in our microscopic cities.

In the finals of the iGEM competition held in Paris on the 2–5 of November, the Vilnius-Lithuania iGEM team, participating for the ninth year, was ranked second and was awarded the gold medal.

Representatives Prof. Kirk T. Semple, PhD Akanimo Odon and Dr Stuart Wagland of Lancaster and Cranfield Universities discussed the possibilities of cooperation in the European Horizon project and student exchanges.

This year has been extremely productive for neuroscientist Dr Urtė Neniškytė: she has just been announced a member of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, she has already published important scientific research, and a few days ago, she congratulated her PhD student on defending her thesis. “It is of great importance for me to represent Lithuania, Lithuania’s neurosciences, and show that they are being successfully developed in our country,” she says.

To celebrate European Biotech Week 2023, students of the Master's degree programme in Molecular Biotechnology at VU LSC visited two biotechnology companies based in Lithuania - AB Amilina Roquette R&D Department and Bioenergy LT. Both companies are members of the Lithuanian Biotechnology Association LithuaniaBIO.

The "Life Sciences Baltics" conference took place in Vilnius last week, bringing together life science enthusiasts from more than 20countries of the world. This biennial event aimed to discuss the development of biotechnology, digital health technologies, the advancement of medicine, and the future prospects of life sciences.

Representatives of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) - Dr Emmanuel Brouillet (Head of the European and International Affairs Division of the Institute of Biology) and Dr Gilles Bonvento (Director of the Laboratory of Neurodegenerative Diseases) - visited the Vilnius University Life Science Center.

The FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence (FKNE) has announced the recruitment of the new 2023 cohort of FENS-Kavli Scholars. Dr Urtė Neniškytė, a neuroscientist at the Vilnius University Life Sciences Center, is among the 15 selected scientists.

A delegation of Academia Sinica of Taiwan has visited the Vilnius University Life Sciences Center (VU LSC) to discuss a possible future scientific co-operation.

Research into bacterial virus protection systems has led to the development of CRISPR-Cas genome scissors, which have made Lithuanian researchers famous worldwide. “It shows how great the potential of this research is, how many undiscovered mechanisms of action there are, which may have many applications in biotechnology, molecular biology, industry and so on in the future,” says Mindaugas Zaremba, a researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology of Vilnius University's Life Sciences Center.