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.

Congratulations, Nils, for winning this years poster prize at the European Nitrogen Fixation Conference, which was held in Naples (Italy) in September 2023! Here, we presented Nils‘ and our former PostDoc Chao’s unpublished work on a novel protein that drives membrane invaginations during symbiotic infections. Stay tuned for the manuscript that will be released (as always by us) as a pre-print on bioRxiv hopefully soon.

Our latest work cellular trajectories steering rhizobial infections is now out as a reviewed pre-print @eLife. Have a look. Great achievement of Morgane Batzenschlager from our lab! Congratulations Morgane and all co-authors involved.

Batzenschlager M, Lace B, Zhang N, Su C, Egli S, Krohn P, Salfeld J, Ditengou FA, Laux T and Ott T (2023)
Competence for transcellular infection in the root cortex involves a post-replicative, cell-cycle exit decision in Medicago truncatula
eLife (reviewed pre-print): https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.88588.1
pre-print deposited at: bioRxiv; https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.28.534635

Work led by the lab of Marco Trujillo is now accepted in Plant Cell. His lab shows that the Exocyst Subunit Exo70B2 is Linked to immunity and autophagy maintaining cellular homeostasis during enhanced secretory activity. We are grateful that we could contribute a bit to this nice project.

Congratulations to all authors!

Teh OK, Lee CW, Ditengou FA, Majovsky P, Klecker T, Furlan G, Zietz M, Hause G, Eschen-Lippold L, Hoehenwarter W, Lee J, Ott T, Trujillo M (2020)
Exocyst subunit Exo70B2 is linked to immune signalling and autophagy
accepted in Plant Cell
pre-print deposited at: bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/266171