Professor Jörg Vogel

Professor Jörg Vogel is a prominent German scientist in the field of RNA biology related to bacterial infections. Dr. Vogel is the Director of the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg and Institute of Molecular Infection Biology (IMIB) and the University of Würzburg. He has received multiple distinguished awards, including the Feldberg Prize in 2019 and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2017. Dr. Vogel’s research focuses on understanding the mechanisms by which the non-coding RNAs of bacterial pathogens are altered during host colonization, and how they influence the gene expression of the microbiota.  

Jörg began studying RNA in 1996 at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany where he earned his PhD characterizing the splicing of group II introns in higher plant chloroplasts under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Börner. In 2000, he joined Prof. Gerhart Wagner’s lab at Sweden University as a postdoctoral fellow to identify new riboregulators in bacteria.  Prof. Wagner was such an inspiring scientist and mentor to him and “a terrific guy and teacher, that inspired me to try to understand RNA biology as a whole, not just focus on my small RNAs (sRNAs) in bacteria. I went back to the literature and tried to understand where the knowledge started and how it evolved” Jörg recalled. A year later, he became an EMBO Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, to study novel small RNAs in Escherichia coli. Afterwards, in 2004, he established an Independent Junior Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany. In 2009, he became a Full Professor and Director of the Institute for Molecular Infection Biology at the University of Würzburg.   

“I do think that as academic scientists, we are in this privileged position that most of us have pretty flexible working hours. So why not work hard when you are really onto something, as most artists would do, but also reserve enough time to refresh mentally and physically and to reflect your work and findings” 

Jörg’s lab is currently most excited about “Programmable RNA antibiotics, which involves the use of RNA-targeting short antisense oligomers to kill or reprogram bacteria” he explained. Jörg is particularly keen on Fusobacterium nucleatum, and he is “trying to understand how this common oral bacterium of humans also colonizes colon cancer and breast cancer tissue”. Vogel lab passionately attempts to translate this research into clinical trials “we want to use RNA technologies to resolve the colonization of tumor sites at single-cell resolution, for both the microbe and cancer cells; and then use programmable RNA antibiotics to eradicate Fusobacterium outside its natural niche (the mouth) in order to improve the therapy and prognosis of cancer patients”, he explained. 

As Jörg is “a biochemist by training” he was drawn to ponder “how combining classic biochemistry methods with more modern high-throughput techniques can accelerate the discovery of molecular factors or principles.” In one example, Jörg defined Grad-seq approach as “the combination of the decades-old glycerol gradient with RNA-seq and high-throughput mass spectrometry”. Grad-seq was developed in his lab to identify novel sRNA-Binding RNA binding proteins (RBPs). “We knew that E. coli and Salmonella expressed close to 300 small noncoding RNAs but not even half of them were targeted by the common sRNA-associated RBPs CsrA and Hfq. So, I was sure that there must be at least one other general sRNA-binding RBP. To find it, I wanted to develop and apply a method that would be generic and could subsequently be applied to the millions of other bacterial species” whose RNA biology is mostly unknown. he explained. This simple, but elegant system “enabled us to discover the protein ProQ as the third common sRNA-related RBP in bacteria” he added.  

Jörg found collaborations with many other scientists as “part of the scientific enterprise and culture” for that reason he always wanted “his students and postdocs to experience that”. “When I start a collaboration, I make sure I have someone in my lab who can act as the main contact person for day-to-day business” Jörg explained. He believes that “No matter whether a collaboration is successful in the end or not, you will always learn something from it”. According to Jörg, it is crucial for junior scientists to be actively engaged in collaborations “I also see collaborations as a training opportunity for my lab members, on top of the exciting scientific question that must be there in the first place and might lead to something new.”

As a scientist, it is essential to maintain a healthy work-life balance in order to lead a well-balanced life. Jörg is “great fan of “work hard, play hard” and he “has always taken the play part as seriously as he did the work part. I have interests outside the lab (traveling, art, canoe racing) and most importantly, I also want to spend time with my family and friends. But I do think that as academic scientists, we are in this privileged position that most of us have flexible working hours. So why not work hard when you are really onto something, as most artists would do, but also reserve enough time to refresh mentally and physically and to reflect your work and findings” he added.  

“The three key elements of success: full dedication to your topic, a respectful relationship with your supervisor, and being a good lab citizen and colleague” 

Jörg’s fundamental advice for current trainees is to place a high importance on the three key elements of success: full dedication to your topic, a respectful relationship with your supervisor, and being a good lab citizen and colleague.  

Jörg recalls that his most significant challenge during his scientific career was right when he became an independent investigator. “When I started my own group at a Max Planck Institute in Berlin, my group was pretty remote from everyone else at the institute, so it was hard for the directors to judge whether or not we were making progress at all. We did not go to the same meetings, we published in different journals. So, they always seemed to worry that my group might not make it. This still occurred even as I was getting invitations to speak at high-profile meetings and even job offers from other places. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have explained why our work mattered more proactively, and that we were also working on some bigger stories.”  

Jörg frequently contemplates the transformation of scientific publishing in recent years, and how to guarantee the reliability of scientific articles. “I worry about the erosion of community journals in favor of many new journals whose main purpose is profit rather than organizing and archiving the knowledge in a certain scientific discipline”. 

Jörg knows that being a member of the RNA society has advantages like allowing people “to interact with scientists who are as passionate as yourself about RNA at the annual RNA society meeting”. He has been nominated and selected to serve on the RNA society board “I strongly believe in the importance of learned societies, and I think that this type of community service is essential.” He also currently serving as the President of the European Academy of Microbiology. Jörg’s vision for the RNA society is to address the fact that it is still seen as “US-centric. It’s natural, as the USA just happens to have many active and visible RNA researchers and both deep and broad RNA research programs at strong institutions” he explained.  Jörg would like “the RNA society to become a truly global RNA society. We are on the way, but there is still work left.”

Obviously, Jörg finds that shameless self-promotion is also an art for spreading your novel ideas and concepts to the broader scientific community. His favorite RNA journal article is “our 2020 paper by Milan Gerovac et al. describing the next generation of Grad-seq, a technique we called GradR. Go and check it out”. You can find him on Twitter @JoergLab. Jörg favorite RNA is RyfD, and he “can’t wait for someone to find out what it is doing!”