Three Trinity College Dublin based scientists are to share €5.55 million in funding for projects in the area of biomedical research.
The money is coming from Science Foundation Ireland in partnership with Wellcome and the Health Research Board through the Investigator Awards in Science programme, which has been funding researchers for seven years.
Dr Rachel McLoughlin will study the interactions between the human immune system and MRSA to try to develop treatments for beating the antibiotic resistant superbug.
In particular, she will investigate mechanisms that might allow MRSA to suppress or avoid detection by the immune system.
Professor Daniel Bradley from the university's Smurfit Institute of Genetics will explore genetic history, including the origin of inherited diseases and how newly discovered genetic differences could impact on modern patients.
He and his team will sample the genomes of 160 pre-historic samples of the petrous bone found all over Ireland and Portugal.
It can act as a time capsule, preserving DNA over thousands of years.
They will do this by sequencing hundreds of thousands of human genomes to better understand the genetic aspects of disease.
While Professor Mani Ramaswami will be studying how the brain regulates access to feelings, perceptions and memories and retrieves them at the right time in fruit flies which have a similar brain structure to humans.
This will be done by studying positive activity of assemblies of excitatory neurons which are what represent perceptions and memories in grey matter.
It is proposed that negative representations of these assemblies are created by the brain to prevent inappropriate activation.
Prof Ramaswami will study the construction of these negative representations, their effects and regulation by environmental or behavioural context.
