Funding for PhD and Postdoc Available

Two exciting career opportunities are available in the Designer Glycans group starting February 2022. The PhD and postdoctoral positions are fully funded and offer outstanding benefits. Our ambitious independent junior research group has state-of-the-art facilities for carbohydrate analysis, cell imaging and plant cultivation. We are looking for candidates who are interested in synthetic biology, plant… Continue reading Funding for PhD and Postdoc Available

New preprint on yeast bioengineering to produce modular plant hemicellulose

Despite rising interest in the engineering of polysaccharide-based biomaterials, relatively little is known about how plant hemicelluloses can be built and tailored in non-plant cell factories. Pichia pastoris is a promising host to study cellulose synthase-like A (CSLA; heteromannan synthases) and CSLC (xyloglucan synthase) activities but the functions of specific protein motifs and the impact… Continue reading New preprint on yeast bioengineering to produce modular plant hemicellulose

Two new MSc students join the lab

We are happy to welcome Sooyun Lee and Tilman Jacob to the Designer Glycans lab. Sooyun first joined us for an internship in February to evaluate fluorescent reporters in Pichia pastoris. She will now start her MSc research thesis on secreting proteins from yeast to modify extracellular glycans. Tilman is a first-year MSc student at… Continue reading Two new MSc students join the lab

Register now for the Leibniz Symposium on Plant Cell Walls

Debora Gasperini, Katharina Bürstenbinder and Catalin Voiniciuc are co-organizing the Leibniz Plant Biochemistry Symposium 2021. This annual conference will be focused on Plant Cell Walls this year, and will be held as an online event for the first time. We have an exciting speaker line-up and there will be free registration for participants from around… Continue reading Register now for the Leibniz Symposium on Plant Cell Walls

February publication update

GAUT11 activity

We are happy to have contributed to a new publication that appeared in Science Advances on the February 10. This study unveils how jasmonate signaling is initiated in the korrigan1 (kor1) cellulose-deficient mutant, and multiple ways in which it can be complemented. The work was lead by Stefan Mielke in Debora Gasperini\’s research group at IPB… Continue reading February publication update

Review of orthogonal hosts to study cell wall synthesis

We published a review article in Plants (https://doi.org/10.3390/plants8110516), part of a special issue on \”Plant Cell Wall Biology\”. In close collaboration with multiple colleagues from Düsseldorf, we assessed the suitability of more than ten orthogonal hosts for synthetic biology and to study plant cell wall biosynthesis. In particular, we focused on the key advantages and… Continue reading Review of orthogonal hosts to study cell wall synthesis