The second funding period of the CGC (CGCII) started in 2012 after a very positive and supportive evaluation by an external committee composed of scientists from academia and industry. The MPG and the companies Bayer Crop Science, Bayer Pharma, Merck KGaA, Boehringer Ingelheim and AstraZeneca supported five newly established independent research groups.
Three of them were located in the BioMedizinZentrum (BMZ) directly adjacent to the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund and led by Tom Grossmann, Sven Hennig and Yaowen Wu. For scientific and infrastructural considerations the other two were located at the MPI for Molecular Biomedicine in Munster (Boris Greber) and at the University of Tubingen (Sascha Laubinger), respectively.