2021

Just a few pictures from our lab cleaning day. It is amazing what a difference a few hours and lots of helping hands can make... And because it is the beginning of the festive season, everybody got their own real Christmas tree today (chamaecyparis thyoides).

Plant reproduction requires pollen grains to generate long tubes to fertilise the egg cells. Steady pollen tube growth and controlled rupture are crucial events that require tight coordination of tip growth and cell wall stability at the cellular level. 

How do you do meiosis with four copies of every chromosome instead of two? A recent "Current Biology" paper by the Bomblies group (IMPB) with collaborators Nancy Kleckner (Harvard) and others, presents a new model suggesting increased crossover interference is key in stabilizing polyploid meiosis.

This week Suzanne returned from her maternity leave. We are so happy to have her finally back in the lab! But her surprise present made us even happier. :-) She brought a terrific tailer-made cake for our lab: The cake was not only vegan, lactose- and gluten free, it was also adorned with beautiful hand-painted arenosa flowers and tasted absolutely fantastic.  

From 16.-18. August 2021, the Bomblies team went on their first retreat. The last time we met in person was over 18 month ago (before ETH decided on the home office recommendation due to COVID19). We thought it was hight time to catch-up in person again.

A study published in Nature Communications, from a collaboration between the Bomblies lab (IMPB) and colleagues at the John Innes Centre and Cambridge University in the UK, presents a new model for how meiotic crossover interference, which is important in chromosome segregation, could work.

Only six weeks after the capture of "Houdini", the amazing garden dormouse, we startet today on yet another animal rescue mission. A young bird slipped through a water drain into a narrow space between the window and the balcony right outside the LFW E55 laboratory.

A recent "Molecular Ecology" paper by the Bomblies group (IMPB) shows that meiotic recombination rate, as well as abnormal chromosome associations that can lead to aneuploidy, co-​vary with temperature across a growing season in wild populations of a tetraploid plant, Arabidopsis arenosa.

Today we had an unexpected and nimble visitor in the office. After he escaped us for hours, we were finally able to convince him to go back home (with the help of an animal welfare escort). ETH sadly rejected all requests for adoption…