13.12.2025 About phun phacts, sleeping beauties and RNAylation
MiNu PI Katharina Höfer held her inauguration lecture on the occasion of this year's Pharmacy Day.
At the beginning of her inaugural lecture, Prof. Dr. Katharina Höfer introduced the audience to the topic with the vivid opening line, "A plant leaf is more than just a leaf." She showed that even a seemingly simple leaf is colonised by an invisible world of microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses. Among these viruses are also "good" viruses – bacteriophages, real "bacteria eaters" that can specifically infect and destroy bacteria.
In humorous "Phun Phacts," she gave an overview of the fascinating properties of phages and then drew a historical arc to the development of phage therapy. She pointed out that phages have undergone several periods of "sleeping beauty" in their medical use – a charming image from the world of fairy tales with a local reference to the Brothers Grimm and their time in Marburg.
Today, however, phages are anything but sleepy: they form a valuable toolbox of modern molecular biology. Prof. Höfer highlighted two milestones: the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas system – the basis of modern gene editing technology – and the T7 phage RNA polymerase, which is now used for RNA synthesis and thus also for the production of mRNA vaccines. She made a local connection to the RNA vaccine production facility in Marburg, which supplied the majority of the coronavirus vaccines used worldwide.
Finally, she highlighted the potential that phages again have for medicine today – especially in the fight against increasing antibiotic resistance. With regard to the recently published WHO Global Antibiotic Resistance Surveillance Report 2025, she emphasised the need for innovative approaches. Phage- and RNA-based therapies could make a decisive contribution here and open up new avenues for the treatment of infections that have been difficult to treat until now.
In the second part of her inaugural lecture, Prof. Dr. Katharina Höfer presented her groundbreaking research findings on RNAylation, a completely novel concept of interaction between RNA and proteins. She showed how certain RNAs can be coupled to proteins with the help of a special chemical feature – so-called NAD-capped RNAs. This form of covalent modification opens up completely new perspectives on the way RNA and proteins communicate with each other and control biological processes.
Prof. Höfer explained that the NAD building block can be regarded as a kind of additional "fifth building block" of RNA. It thus extends the structural and functional diversity of RNA far beyond the classic four nucleotides. In order to be able to study these specialised RNAs in a targeted manner, she developed the innovative NAD-capture-Seq method. This method allows NAD-modified RNAs to be literally "fished out" and comprehensively characterised. Her research shows how RNAylation reveals novel regulatory mechanisms – mechanisms that not only change our understanding of bacterial gene expression, but also open up perspectives for biotechnological and medical applications.
Prof. Dr. Katharina Höfer, deputy spokesperson of GRK 2937, has been appointed head of the Pharmaceutical Biotechnology working group at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology and Biotechnology at Marburg University. In addition to numerous distinctions, she is also a member of Marburg's Cluster of Excellence Microbes for Climate – M4C.
Her scientific work focuses on the regulation of bacterial gene expression at the RNA level: her group is researching RNA modifications, such as NAD-capped RNAs, and their role in the interaction of bacteria with bacteriophages. Her team recently discovered a previously unknown enzymatic reaction that binds RNA to proteins (RNAylation). For her outstanding scientific achievements, she received the Otto Meyerhof Prize from the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM) in 2024 and was accepted into the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Young Investigators Network.
On this year's Pharmacy Day on 9 December, the Department of Pharmacy at Philipps University of Marburg again opened its doors to focus on research, teaching and career prospects in a lively scientific exchange. Two inaugural lectures and a total of 27 posters presented the diversity of current projects in the pharmacy working groups and invited students, doctoral candidates, staff and professors to engage in direct conversation.