Lars Grøntved from BMB beat the odds
Associate Professor Lars Grøntved, Centre for Functional Genomics and Tissue Plasticity, BMB, is one of the few researchers to have received a Sapere Aude grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark this year.
He has received DKK 5,814,720 for the project Transcriptional control of hepatic food anticipation.
A total of 388 men and women contended for the elite initiative which will give promising young researchers the chance to assemble a team and carry out a research project.
Only 6 % were awarded funding
The number of applications has risen steadily since 2010. However, despite the fact that funds from the research reserve were transferred to accommodate the large number of applications, only 6% of applications were awarded funding this year.
Between 2013 and 2016, the success rate fell from 15% to 7.5%.
The foundation has awarded around DKK 165 million this year.
About the project
The background for Lars Grøntved's project is:
Food anticipation is regulated by complex communication between the central nervous system and peripheral tissues. This motivates the animal to search for food and eat. Feeding in turn initiates signaling cascades facilitating cellular uptake of nutrients and maintenance of metabolic homeostasis. The liver is a central responder to feeding and acts to take up and redistribute nutrients, associated with dynamic transcription of hundreds of genes.
Deregulation of these processes are linked to the pathology of obesity-related disorders such diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. While the hepatic transcriptional response to feeding has been studied for decades far less is known about transcriptional control of food-anticipation by the liver. This proposal aims to use a novel proteomic strategy to identify central transcriptional regulators of hepatic food-anticipation. This will be combined with a genetic approach to uncover the role of cortisol signaling in this process.