Homing in Braunschweig

Understanding the process of cell-cell self recognition and fusion is a biological process important in the development of many multi-cellular organisms. Neurospora crassa is a great model experimental system for understanding this process. I am currently in Braunschweig visiting Andre Fleisner's group in the Institute of Genetics, Braunschweig Technical University. I have thoroughly enjoyed my visit here meeting and talking with the students and Andre about how cell-cell fusion occurs and some pioneering studies on understanding whether N. crassa in nature is an endophyte. The attendance at my seminar was quite overwhelming - a great audience with lots of good questions.

Remarkably, I had an email last week from Torsten Thuenen who I first met in 2000 while I was in Germany for the International Endophyte meeting in Paderborn when we had discussions about possible PhD study in my lab. He had just been reading my Blog. He now has a position at the Julius Kuehn-Institute here in Braunschweig and is keen to set up an Epichloe endophyte research program. So great we were able to catch up after my seminar. Also nice to briefly catch up with Chris Eickhorst who did an internship in my lab in 2012 and Barbara Schulz who I have known for a long time and has had a long standing interest in endophytes. I just have to come back to Braunschweig next year.

I also enjoyed talking to Ralf Schnabel about Phainothea, a tool he has developed to generate abstract images that capture the phenotype of C. elegans. Wonderful science and terrific scientific art. Very generously he gave me a copy of his book entitled Aletheia that captures these abstract images and some others that express his views about science and education.

Ralf Schnablel's distance maps

Barry, Rheinhard, Andre and Ralf