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
Lab News
Update to our bioRxiv preprint
We significantly revised our preprint on the modular biosynthesis of plant heteromannans and uploaded the new version to bioRxiv. Full-text: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.20.440611v2.full
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
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
New publication in New Phytologist
By evaluating different mutant combinations, we discovered that brassica seeds with fewer heteromannan branches are more resistant to salt stress.
New publication on wheat mannan
Wheat is one of the most important cereal crops on the planet. Here, we investigated the wheat enzymes are responsible for synthesizing mannan, a dietary fiber.
Our first preprint: the importance of seed mucilage polymers
The first preprint of the Designer Glycans lab has been posted on bioRxiv, an open access repository for biological sciences
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