So Rudolf seems to binge-watch the Great British Bake off (or similar) these days, which is why he brought a huge plate of leaf-shaped biscuits for his birthday - and check it out, all of them are colonised by coloured bacteria. What fun :-) also delicious ! ​Happy Birthday Rudolf!!!

Remnants of the last postdoc: "Conjugation dynamics of self-transmissible and mobilisable plasmids into E. coli O157:H7 on Arabidopsis thaliana rosettes" can now be found at BioRvix and is under review elsewhere.

Congrats Moritz!

Rudolf will be this weeks ambassador for "study in New Zealand" on Instagram. We should all follow him and his adventures :)

We are looking forward to have Moritz Miebach joining our team. Moritz recently finished his MSc. at the University Freiburg in Germany and will investigate transcriptional responses of Arabidopsis thaliana to non-pathogenic bacteria.

An exciting preprint paper about solving problematic bacterial genome assemblies with the fabulous PI Dr. Christian Ahrens and Michal Schmid at Agroscope, CH, is now available at BioRxiv

We had a great time in Auckland at the NZMEC 5. First of all the Mexican restaurant we found served plenty of wonderful vegetarian food and gluten free food to satisfy everyone in the group. Secondly, the ~100 participant symposium was wonderful (!), a great platform to network and to show off our own science. Erica, Rudolf, Simi and Michal presented their posters and I was invited to present some of the new stuff that we are currently working on.

We cleaned our little lab empire - good reason to finally take a picture of our group. Also, afterwards we binge ate Indian food... hmmm Indian...