Professor Marcin Nowotny Receives the Prime Minister’s Award

Prof. Marcin Nowotny, PhD, DSc has been honored with the Prime Minister’s Award for his discovery of new mechanisms involved in cellular information processing. The award recognizes his research on protein and nucleic acid interactions. According to the Prime Minister’s Office, these discoveries contribute to a deeper understanding of the fundamental processes related to the decoding of genetic information.

Prof. Marcin Nowotny receiving an award from Prime Minister Donald Tusk (November 29, 2024).
Photo: Chancellery of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

“I am delighted to receive the Prime Minister’s Award and I am grateful to the committee for recognizing our research performed over many years,” said Prof. Marcin Nowotny. “This work encompasses a series of publications describing studies on bacterial and viral systems for processing nucleic acids DNA and RNA, which serve as carriers of genetic information. Among other findings, we have uncovered elements of bacterial antiphage defense mechanisms, as well as processes involved in the replication of viruses and transposons, also known as jumping genes. Notably, we identified new ways proteins recognize nucleic acids by deforming RNA and DNA structure. I sincerely thank the members of my team for their contributions to this research,” concluded the Prime Minister’s Award laureate.

The recognized achievements are described in eight experimental studies published between 2017 and 2024, in which Prof. Marcin Nowotny served as the corresponding author. The articles were published in prestigious scientific journals, including Molecular Cell, Nature Communications, Nucleic Acids Research, Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Journal of Virology, and Journal of Biological Chemistry. Part of the research was conducted in collaboration with leading international institutions, such as Cornell University (USA), Lund University (Sweden), and the Institute of Biophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The awarded research focuses on understanding new atomic-level mechanisms by which proteins recognize and process nucleic acids. Experiments were conducted using advanced structural biology methods, including protein crystallography and Cryo-EM, a technique adopted by Prof. Nowotny’s team as one of the first in Poland. The publications feature discoveries that provide a significant and original contribution to understanding genetic information processing, with the studied protein systems holding innovative application potential.

Prof. Marcin Nowotny leads the Laboratory of Protein Structure at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw.