Great hospitality in Bochum

What wonderful hospitality we have received for our visit to Bochum, one of 3 large cities - the others being Dortmund and Essen - all within 20 km of one another in what is one of the most densely populated areas of Germany. Once the heart of the coal and steel industry for Germany until the last coal mine closed in 1993. Now Germany imports cheaper coal from Australia! Downtown Bochum is a wonderful open pedestrian area with lots of large modern buildings from which the towers of several old churches emerge.

The University is to the South East of the the city centre and is one of the largest universities in Germany with around 50,000 students. Its not an attractive university - it is a bit of a concrete jungle of buildings designed like ships with funnels on the top and colour coded by faculty - green for science, red for medicine and yellow for humanities. But next to the Biology building is one of the best University Botanic gardens in Germany - a national treasure. The green houses have thousands and thousands of potted plants from all over the world. Unfortunately I did not get too much time to look at this wonderful collection of plants but Christine had a 2 h guided tour while I talked science with Ulrich's students.

Ulrich Kück was a wonderful host. On Monday we had lunch in an old farm house within the Botanic garden that has been converted to a restaurant followed by a tour of the Botanic gardens. Yesterday Ulrich took me to the University Mensa where they serve around 4000 meals a day - see photos below - quite staggering. After my seminar Ulrich presented me with a University mug and a Frühstücksbrettchen. We then went to his house for dinner with some of his lab where we sampled some great beer and wine not to mention the prawns and white asparagus.

The science they are doing within his Department is outstanding. They are working on fruiting body development in Sordaria (pro mutants and STRIPAK complex), role of mating type genes and penicillin biosynthesis in Penicillium chrysogenum, cephalosporin biosynthesis in Acremonium chrysogenum in cooperation with the drug giant Sandoz (in Austria) and trans-splicing (similar to bacterial Type II intron splicing) in the chloroplast of Chlamydomonas. Some common themes within their projects are the wide use of RNAseq, ChIP seq and TAP tagging of large protein complexes and identification of the products by Mass Spec in collaboration with a group at Dortmund. Much of the work I heard about was presented at Asilomar. Some of the technical tips I picked up on various methods should be very helpful. We do need a better quality genome assembly of E. festucae to be able to do ChIP seq experiments.

To qualify for a PhD at the University of Bochum the students must have one first authored paper published and at least one other first authored manuscript prepared for submission. Of course there are exceptions to this general rule but that is the general policy. Interestingly in The Netherlands PhD students are required to have a total of 4 publications with I think 2 of them first authored. Everyone here starts work at 8 am in the morning so they all put in long hours. Several of them commute from Dortmund or Essen each day.

We head back to Marburg this morning. Luckily our bookings are with private rail companies as the Deutschebahn workers have gone on strike today until Sunday - one of the biggest and most disruptive train worker strikes in Germany's history.