We were absolutely thrilled by Chao‘s announcement today that he will be appointed as a full professor at Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China from summer 2023 onwards! Congratulations Chao to this fantastic achievement and many thanks for your outstanding contributions to the lab.

Congratulations Nils for winning the alumni prize of the Faculty of Biology for his outstanding MSc thesis! His work “Mapping spatiotemporal lipid patterns on symbiotic membranes using genetically encoded biosensors” revealed some interesting distinct lipid patterns during root nodule symbiosis and was his entry to the world of imaging!

Part of his work was included into our recent manuscript:

Su C, Rodriguez-Franco M, Lace B, Nebel N, Hernandez-Reyes C, Liang P, Schulze E, Popp C, Keller J, Libourel C, Fischer AAM, Gabor KE, Mymrikov EV, Gross NM, Mark E, Hunte C, Weber W, Wendler P, Stanislas T, Delaux PM, Einsle O, Ott T (2022)
Remorin proteins serve as membrane topology scaffolds in plants
pre-printed deposited at: bioRxiv; https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.15.484384v1 (open access)

We made our newest study on membrane function and regulation available on bioRxiv. Here, we described the remorin protein SYMREM1 as a new membrane topology scaffold in plants and demonstrate that it can stabilize membrane conformations during symbiotic infections.

Reference:

Su C, Rodriguez-Franco M, Lace B, Nebel N, Hernandez-Reyes C, Liang P, Schulze E, Popp C, Keller J, Libourel C, Fischer AAM, Gabor KE, Mymrikov EV, Gross NM, Mark E, Hunte C, Weber W, Wendler P, Stanislas T, Delaux PM, Einsle O, Ott T (2022)
Remorin proteins serve as membrane topology scaffolds in plants
pre-printed deposited at: bioRxiv; https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.15.484384v1 (open access)

We are searching a new colleague to strengthen the plant science community in Freiburg! All levels of experience will be considered.

Find more information at:

We are happy to announce that our group member Pengbo Liang has accepted a position as associate professor at the China Agricultural University in Beijing to start in April 2022.

Congratulations Pengbo!

It is sad for us to say good-bye to our lab member Franck Ditengou. But it is a great step into the future, as he will be leader the ‘Lighthouse Core Facility‘ at the Medical Faculty of the University of Freiburg. Congratulations Franck!

Is autonomous fertilization of crops possible? The information platform transGEN together with Science Slammer David Spencer and myself assembled a short video explaining our approach and the potential impact. Have a look on Youtube (in German only).

So proud of my doctoral student Chao Su, who graduated with distinction today. Congratulations, Chao! So well deserved. Stay tuned for his new manuscripts being released as pre-print soon. Thanks to the reviewers Jürgen Kleine-Vehn and Winfried Römer.

I am happy to join the panel to discuss aspects of “Clicks, likes and preprints: are we entering a new age of scientific publication?“, which is part of the CIBSS Symposium “Signalling across scales”.

The live stream on Youtube can be followed here.

Looking with great concern to all kinds of discrimination throughout all sectors of our society, we, as a whole team, would like to explicitly state our solidarity with all people standing up for equality!

Congratulation to our PhD student Pengbo, who received one of the three awards for the best talk during our internal plant science seminar series (DOMPS) in 2019!

Please have a look at this year’s EMBO Practical Course on “Advanced Electron Microscopy for Cell Biology”, which will be held on 16-26 Jun 2020 at the EMBL Training Centre in Heidelberg, Germany. Great to see our head of EM Marta Rodriguez-Franco to be involved again. Find more information here.