Great news: Henriette Rübsam joined our team as a PostDoc and Research Manager. Knowing her from the ENSA project as a PhD student with Kasper Andersen at Aarhus University, the whole team is now looking forward to her valuable inputs and skills.

Observing the misuse of social media and the influence used by owner Elon Musk to support far-right winged parties and movements together with continuous and unbearable fake news and lies spread on this platform made us leaving X fully after 12 years. We now exclusively follow and send posts on Bluesky, which hopefully stays integer in the future. Follow us.

We are hosting the imaging workshop in frame of the SFB1381 today with inspirational talks by Beatrice Lace, Marta-Rodriguez Franco, Angela Nauman (LIC), Franck Ditengou (LightHouse) and Thorsten Hugel (Chemistry).

In our current review, we aimed to discuss the new concept of the “transcellular passage cleft” (TCP). This apoplastic compartment actively contributes to the cell-to-cell passage of infection threads in legumes.

Interested? Then read the whole story in:

Zhang G and Ott T (2024)
Cellular morphodynamics and signaling around the transcellular passage cleft during rhizobial infections of legume roots
Current Opinion in Cell Biology; 91: 102436

Great thanks to Yvon Jaillais (Lyon) and Julien Gronnier for taking the initiative to work out a set of guidelines for describing membrane domains in plants. Was a pleasure to contribute.

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Jaillais Y, Bayer E, Bergmann DC, Botella MA, Boutté Y, Bozkurt TO, Caillaud MC, Germain V, Grossmann G, Heilmann I, Hemsley PA, Kirchhelle C, Martinière A, Miao Y, Mongrand S, Müller S, Noack LC, Oda Y, Ott T, Pan X, Pleskot R, Potocky M, Robert S, Sanchez Rodriguez C, Simon-Plas F, Russinova E, Van Damme D, van Norman JM, Weijers D, Yalovsky S, Yang Z, Zelazny E, Gronnier J (2024)
Guidelines for naming and studying plasma membrane domains in plants
Nature Plants; doi.org/10.1038/s41477-024-01742-8

Thomas received this years award for the best teaching in the basic modules for our BSc students during winter term 2023/2024.

“I am really excited and grateful to all undergraduate students for receiving this appreciation of my teaching efforts. It’s a great motivation to continue and means a lot to me.”

What a great day and honor for the Faculty of Biology to award the honorary doctorate to Prof. Joachim Frank from Columbia University. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2017 for his groundbreaking work on image processing in cryoEM.

Thomas had the pleasure to lead the discussion with early career scientist from our University, where Prof. Frank provided all kinds of insights into his career, his opinions on publications and funding systems, etc. Many thanks to him and all participants.

Congratulation to Katharina Schiessl (SLCU Cambridge, UK), Morgane from our team and all other authors for their nice piece of work on the role of LSH transcription factors and their role in nodulation. Thanks for giving us the chance to participate in this scientific journey.

Lee T, Orvosova M, Batzenschlager M, Batista BM, Bailey PC, Mohd-Radzman NA, Gurzadyan A, Stuer N, Mysore KS, Wen J, Ott T, Oldroyd GED, Schiessl K (2024)
Light-sensitive short hypocotyl genes confer symbiotic nodule identity in the legume Medicago truncatula
Current Biology; doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.01.018

This course is a must for everyone who would like to get some hands-on experience on cutting-edge transmission electron microscopes. Great to see Marta Rodriguez-Franco, manager of our EM facility, teaching there as well.

We are happy to announce that Bikash Raul joined the lab as a PostDoc after finishing his PhD in Senjuti Sinharoy’s lab at the  National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi, India. Great to have you here and to work together with you in the next years.

We would like to thank all our collaborators, friends and colleagues for creating such a sparkling working atmosphere and drive our science forward. We wish everyone a happy, peaceful and healthy Christmas break and a great start into the new year.

We are happy to welcome our new team member Magda Tsitsikli who started in October as a PostDoc in the lab. She joins us from Simona Radutoiu’s team at Aarhus University, where she did her PhD. We are all looking forward to work with you, Magda.