Since all plant science labs participate in a common plant molecular biology progress seminar, it was recently decided to award a small price for the three best talks and papers of the past year. We are happy to announce that Pengbo Liang, doctoral student in the lab and first author of our recent PNAS paper received one of the prices this year. Congratulations Pengbo!
Find more information about DOMPS here.
Marta Rodriguez, head of our EM unit, just returned from the Nobel prize ceremony in Stockholm where she witnessed the greatest moment for every scientist. She was honored when she was invited by this year’s Nobel Laureate Jacques Dubochet (University of Lausanne), who received the award together with Joachim Frank (Columbia University) and Richard Henderson (MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology) for pioneering cryo-EM. Congratulations to the laureates.
We are happy to announce that we were able to recruit Dr. Marco Trujillo who is currently the head of a junior group at the IPB in Halle (Germany) as an interim professor to Freiburg. With his expertise in plant-pathogen interactions and protein ubiquitination, he is a great fit here. Welcome!
The initial proposal for the “Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies” (CIBSS) has been successful in the first round of the national Excellence Strategy 2017. This competition is headed by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) and aims to identify novel and innovative local clusters. CIBSS will study signalling across different spatial and temporal scales by understanding mechanisms on the molecular level. This should be translated into specific control of function approaches. Congratulations for this important first step to the CIBSS team but also to the Freiburg livMatS cluster.
Our new Facebook page is online now. You can find us as “Dynamic Plant Membrane Interfaces”. While some of the web content will be shared there, we will also post some other lab news including teaching information, student positions, group activities, etc. Just follow us or post a comment.
Claudia successfully defended her thesis at the LMU in Munich! In her work, she made major contributions for our understanding of the membrane binding mechanism of remorins and studied symbiotic dualism in legumes. Congratulations Claudia! We wish you good luck for your future.
We spent quite some time on thinking about a group logo that Bea and Paolo now created. We leave a lot room for imaginations, what this is all about. But there is more in it than you may initially think. Hope you will recognize it wherever you see it.
We will join the Engineering Nitrogen Symbiosis for Africa (ENSA) consortium (headed by Giles Oldroyd (SLCU)), which is currently mainly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as a partner. ENSA aims to use biological nitrogen fixation to sustainably increase yields for small-holder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.
Congratulations! Corinna defended her PhD thesis with great success at the University of Munich. She worked on a novel and nanodomain-localized receptor-like kinase that is involved in plant immunity using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system. Well done!
