Assistant professor receives prestigious ERC Starting Grant for research project at the Department of Chemistry

Mette Galsgaard Malle, Assistant Professor, has received a prestigious ERC Starting Grant for the research project SPARTA. The grant will enable her to establish an independent research programme and pursue ambitious new research into how alpha-synuclein aggregates begin to form and contribute to Parkinson’s disease processes long before symptoms appear.

3. september 2026 af Mie Lindeman Olsen

Alpha-synuclein is a neuronal protein involved in regulating the transport of synaptic vesicles and the release of neurotransmitters, which enable communication between nerve cells. In Parkinson’s disease, however, the protein can aggregate, a process associated with the progressive loss of nerve cells.

The SPARTA project (Single-Vesicle Platform for Real-Time Detection of Membrane-Catalyzed Aggregation and Transmission) enables direct, real-time visualisation of the aggregation on natural and synthetic vesicles both intra- and intercellularly. The goal is to understand how the membrane lipid composition of the vesicles affects alpha-synuclein aggregation in order to develop a diagnostic assay for detecting early onset of Parkinson’s disease.

In Parkinson’s disease, normally soluble α-synuclein can form small toxic aggregates and eventually larger fibrils. These aggregates can damage membranes and spread between cells. SPARTA will use real-time single-molecule and single-vesicle imaging to uncover how membrane composition influences these early events and investigate how α-synuclein aggregation is linked to membrane toxicity and neuronal damage.

Mette explains why understanding these early stages of the disease is so important:

'I am over the moon excited and incredibly happy to receive this funding, and I cannot wait for us to get started. Parkinson’s disease may begin developing more than a decade before the characteristic motor symptoms appear, yet these earliest stages remain largely invisible to us. With SPARTA, we will move beyond conventional bulk measurements and watch individual molecules and vesicles in real time. If we can uncover what happens during this hidden phase of the disease, it could fundamentally change our understanding of how Parkinson’s begins and ultimately open new possibilities for much earlier diagnosis and intervention.’

Mette is currently based at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Aarhus University and will carry out the SPARTA project at the Department of Chemistry.

ERC Starting Grants support promising early-career researchers who are ready to establish their own independent research team or programme. Awarded by the European Research Council, the grants provide up to EUR 1.5 million over five years for ambitious frontier research, with scientific excellence as the sole criterion for evaluation.