I’m deeply honored to share that I have been appointed W1 Professor 🎓 at the Faculty of Medicine of Kiel University (@uni-kiel.de) and the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH)

About a month ago, I had the honor of giving an invited talk at #NK2025 in beautiful Tasmania. It was a real pleasure to connect with so many bright minds in the field and share some of our latest work on #NKcells and #viruses.

7/9 …for the NK cells, this means that loss-of-inhibition is reverted and, in turn, inhibition via NKG2A is recovered. As such, the disadvantageous effect of the ancestral peptide is lost, indicating a molecular adaptation of the virus to NK cell recognition

5/9 …and indeed, the presentation of the mutated peptide is clearly impaired! The crystal structure (solved by Adnane Achour and colleagues) indicates altered occupancy of the B-pocket as underlying reason for this

4/9 …this single nucleotide substitution led to a M>I mutation at position 2 of the peptide - this really caught our attention 🚨 because p2 is a major anchor position for peptide presentation on HLA-E…