Lab outing and updates summer 2025

Last Friday we enjoyed our yearly lab outing. This year, Kevin Daniel organized a hike and educative guided boat ride through the Taubergiessen Nature Reserve. We learnt a lot about the local flora and fauna and even spotted some Nutria, Kingfishers and flooded plants ;)

It was a great occasion to detach a bit from lab work and get to know each other better. We recently welcomed new postdoctoral research Omar Hewedy, who aims to use ethylene-modulating bacteria to improve crop growth and resilience. We also celebrated Rim Chaudhury's birthday! Unfortunately, it was also a moment realizing that many of fantastic students are about to finish their internships but they and their positive influence on our team will forever be remembered.

It was also a good moment to celebrate some recent achievements. I (Sjon) passed my tenure track interim evaluation and we now have a better idea of what will be required for positive full tenure evaluation (as the saying goes: publish or perish! ;)). With several team members, we also wrote a review on ethylene signal generation and progression through epigenetic mechanisms that was published in Current Opinion in Plant Science. Moreover, we contributed to an exciting research paper of our collaborator Eleazar Rodriguez demonstrating how autophagy controls ethylene signal removal after developmental transitions and stress occurrence.

Also, our MSc student Johanna Söntgerath, who worked under supervision of Aida Maric on epigenome editing tools, was awarded the best #plantscience Master Thesis 2025 of University of Freiburg by the Deutsche Botanische Gesellschaft. We´re very proud of her, and she will now move on to pursue her PhD with Dr. Jake Harris at the University of Cambridge.

Next month, we really look forward to update the ISPLORE community on our ongoing projects at the main ISPLORE conference in Japan. This will be an exciting moment for our team, as five of our lab members will present! Finally, we hope to prepare at least 2 manuscripts on flooding stress memory by the end of the year and share our findings with the world.