Yearly Archives: 2026

Biofilms – highly organised microbial communities – are often the hidden cause of recurrent infections in humans and animals, as well as contamination in food and pharmaceutical production. As these communities grow into 3D structures, microscopy is becoming increasingly important for their investigation, while imaging data processing requires multidisciplinary expertise. At the IJS, through collaboration […]

Plant-waste cellulose is a renewable carbon source that lactic acid bacteria cannot naturally utilize. Within the ERA-NET Cell4Chem project, researchers from Department of Biotechnology at the Jožef Stefan Institute (IJS), in collaboration with researchers from Laboratoire de Chimie Bactérienne (LCB) at CNRS institute in Marseille and Aix-Marseille University, engineered Lactococcus cremoris to degrade cellulose and […]

Our colleagues Jerica Sabotič and Nika Zaveršek attended the Eurobiofilms 2026 conference in Guimarães, Portugal, from June 17 to 20, 2026, where they delivered a talk titled “MicroICS demonstrates the predictive value of biofilm structure” and presented a poster titled “Functional Fungal Proteins and Nanomaterials as Novel Strategies for Biofilm Control.”

In March 2026, several new research projects funded by the Slovenian national research and innovation agency (ARIS) officially began. These three-year projects were selected through a highly competitive 2025 call for proposals and are led by our colleagues Boris Rogelj and Jerica Sabotič. Additionally, several projects involving our department as a collaborative partner have also […]

The first Biofilms@IJS symposium was held on April 2, 2026, at the Jožef Stefan Institute, bringing together researchers working on various aspects of microbial biofilms. The event highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and addressing biofilms, which are complex microbial communities with both harmful and beneficial roles in natural and engineered environments.The symposium […]

In the study led by dr. Jerica Sabotič researchers from the Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular and Structural Biology at the Jožef Stefan Institute, in collaboration with the Agricultural Institute of Slovenia, and the Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, and international partners, have published a new article in the Journal […]

A recent study by the Cancer Proteolytic Pathways Research Group addresses a key reason why cancer remains difficult to treat: many tumours establish a profoundly immunosuppressive microenvironment that compromises anti-tumour immunity. Among the most promising effector populations are natural killer (NK) cells, which can efficiently recognize and eliminate cancer stem cells—a tumour subpopulation often resistant […]