The health and well-being of humans, animals and plants, and a stable climate, are major concerns of our time. The functioning of all ecosystems on Earth depends critically on finely balanced interactions among microorganisms thriving in interconnected habitats like soil, water, and the human body. The balance of these microbiomes is constantly challenged by environmental and anthropogenic disturbances, leading to ecosystem degradation, severe crop losses, or disease. Current therapeutics often target symptoms rather than root causes, using disruptive agents like non-specific antibiotics that can worsen conditions. Although these issues are of utmost societal importance, there is a critical gap in our knowledge of the molecular factors that control microbiome dynamics.

The Cluster of Excellence Biosystems Design Munich (BioSysteM) is dedicated to the creation of a vivid, interdisciplinary research environment that will enable the transition to a constructional design approach towards the life sciences. Designing complex molecular and cellular systems with programmable properties resembling those of living organisms will enable us to better understand life as a phenomenon, create living or life-like materials with unprecedented capabilities, and build the foundation for a revolutionary next generation of applications in the life sciences and biomedicine.

Today’s world is witnessing an ever-increasing number of older people. Aging is the primary risk factor for diabetes, cardiac, kidney, neurodegenerative, and skin diseases – among others. This dramatic demographic change poses enormous health and socio-economic challenges for societies, highlighting the urgent need to foster a healthy aging agenda.

Climate change and the depletion of natural resources threaten global food security and ecosystem stability. The Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences (CEPLAS) addresses these great challenges through fundamental research on complex traits of plants and associated microbiota (holobiont) that impact adaptation to limited resources and environmental change. This knowledge is key to CEPLAS’s long-term goal of predicting plant performance and enabling the design of SMART plants with novel traits and improved environmental adaptation.

Our mission is to understand the molecular language of life. How do cells in the body perceive signals in their environment, integrate this information to make decisions, and communicate with one another to coordinate functions in tissues? By developing new tools to control signalling, we strive to accelerate innovation for health and sustainable agriculture.

Human health depends critically on the microorganisms associated with body surfaces, collectively referred to as the microbiome. In a healthy state, these commensal microbes together support important physiological host functions. In contrast, bacterial pathogens cause millions of deaths per year, with rising numbers, driven by antibiotic resistance and limited corporate antibiotic development programs. Preventing the spread and infection by antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens (ARBPs) is essential for preserving fundamental medical achievements of the 20th century.

At the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, we aim to create a global hotspot for the integrated study of collective behaviour across a wide range of species and across scales of organization. 

Despite significant advances, heart and lung diseases remain the leading causes of death worldwide. In addition, the success of current therapies combined with improved long-term survival and an aging society, has changed the course of disease and created new challenges that need innovative solutions. The development of targeted therapies requires deep understanding of the complex metabolic, (epi-)genomic and proteomic changes underlying cardiopulmonary diseases and a collaborative effort to translate discoveries.

Forests cover about 30% of the global land surface and provide many crucial ecosystem services (ESs) such as renewable resources production, climate change mitigation, water retention, promotion of human health, and protection of biodiversity. However, with rapid climate change, unprecedented disturbances, the introduction of non-native and loss of native species, large tracts of forests are developing into novel ecosystems with no analogue in evolutionary history. The extent to which these novel ecosystems can provide desired ESs and protect biodiversity is highly uncertain.

Plants are the foundation of terrestrial life. To ensure survival, plants have evolved effective and versatile strategies that cope with changes in the environment, ensuring robustness, i.e. the maintenance of function despite perturbation. Given increasing anthropogenic pressures on our planet, understanding the mechanisms and limits of plant robustness is crucial for developing effective, knowledge-based mitigation strategies to preserve plant-based ecosystems and ensure agricultural productivity.

Despite intensive research efforts, we are facing a rapidly increasing number of cancer cases and cancer deaths worldwide. Successes in cancer screening and early detection have meant that some tumors can be detected earlier and treated curatively, but, depending on the tumor disease, 25-50% of all solid cancers are still diagnosed at an advanced, often metastatic stage. Such tumors are complex systemic diseases which, despite a growing number of novel therapeutics, are still incurable in most cases. They are the focus of the iFIT Cluster of Excellence.

ImmunoPreCept pioneers a paradigm shift in medicine: moving from treating symptomatic diseases to actively preserving health. The cluster deciphers how immune-tissue networks maintain homeostasis and how early molecular changes can predict disease, enabling targeted prevention and early interception of common chronic diseases.

Immunology is fundamental to human health and thus highly relevant to society. ImmunoSensation has become an internationally visible immunological center with strong collaborative ties to leading institutions worldwide and has made numerous contributions to immunology, particularly innate immunity. Its innovative scientific concept of the immune system as a sensory system is now an accepted paradigm and immune sensing a widely used term.

LeiCeM is a clinically oriented research center dedicated to finding novel approaches that change trajectories in patients with the “metabolic syndrome” (MetS) to reduce disease burden (heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, liver disease, neurodegeneration).

A key driver of the climate crisis is the man-made imbalance in the carbon cycle. Microorganisms play a key role in the biological carbon cycle because they invented the conversion of CO2 billions of years ago and made our planet a life-friendly world. Today, they convert about as much CO2 globally as plants do.

The goal of the cluster of excellence Multiscale Bioimaging: from Molecular Machines to Networks of Excitable Cells (MBExC) is to decipher disease-relevant nanoscale functional units in cardiac and neural excitable cells.

One of the most spectacular of all animal behaviours is the ability to precisely navigate over vast distances. Transcontinental flights of tiny insects with minute brains or the global movements of billions of birds, sometimes to destinations never previously visited, are remarkable feats which are still barely understood. The scientific mission of NaviSense is to provide a thorough, interdisciplinary understanding of the senses and mechanisms used by animals to navigate, and how these mechanisms can inspire technology and impact society, ecology, and biodiversity.

The focus of our cluster of excellence is on understanding neurological and psychiatric disorders. The aim of this interdisciplinary research network is to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying disease mechanisms and, on this basis, to develop new therapeutic approaches.

Nucleic acid research has continued to provide groundbreaking insights into fundamental biological mechanisms. Originally considered primarily as carriers of genetic information, we now know that nucleic acids can also play an active role, for example as catalysts of enzymatic reactions, as structural components of macromolecular complexes, as guide and scaffold structures, as regulators and even as signaling molecules and ligands (nucleic acids as ‘subjects’).

PhenoRob represents a sustainable, technology-driven transformation of agriculture. The Cluster of Excellence addresses the central challenge of making crop production more efficient, resource-conserving, and sustainable at the same time. The aim is to explore new pathways for future-oriented crop production through novel technology-driven approaches and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Cluster of Excellence “Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation” (PMI) investigates how chronic inflammations can be better understood, treated, and prevented on an individual basis. A particular focus lies on translational clinical research.

The RESIST Cluster of Excellence team is committed to helping people who are particularly susceptible to infections. These include newborns, senior citizens and people with weakened immune systems. For them, viruses and bacteria can be not only stressful, but often life-threatening.

The central vision of the Cluster of Excellence SCALE (Subcellular Architecture of Life) is to understand the molecular principles that govern the internal organization of cells. SCALE investigates how cellular structures are formed, how they dynamically change, and how they communicate with one another in health, stress, and disease.

SyNergy — the Munich Cluster of Systems Neurology — defined Systems Neurology as a new research field where systems-level biology and systems neuroscience meet clinical neurology. Backed by the two Munich Excellence universities and five Helmholtz and Max Planck institutes, this long-term program has yielded remarkable insights and established permanent infrastructure.

Bottom-up Synthetic Immunology: New Strategies Against Infection and Cancer. Infectious diseases such as AIDS and malaria, along with hard-to-treat cancers like pancreatic and brain tumors, continue to pose major global health challenges. Despite significant progress, effective preventive or curative measures remain elusive for many of these conditions. A shared feature of these diseases is their ability to evade the immune system—often through similar mechanisms. Yet, targeted interventions to modulate the complex interactions between immune cells and tissues remain limited, and experimental models to study such interventions are still in their infancy.