Molecular Basis of Coral Symbiosis
Iliona Wolfowicz is the first graduated PhD student from the Guse lab. Iliona defended her thesis last week at University of Porto “with distinction”. Congratulations Dr. Wolfowicz! We are looking forward for you to come back to Heidelberg to celebrate your big success.
This year´s COS Symposium “Senses and Sensitivity” was a big success. We had an excellent line-up of international, national and local speakers covering a wide range of scientific topics. Both, Victor and Marie presented Guse lab posters at the poster session and the Symposium concluded with a BBQ thanks to COS group leader Lazaro Centanin who knows his Argentinian meat.
We are very happy to announce that Victor was awarded an EMBO long term fellowship. The fellowship will support his postdoctoral work over the next two years. Congratulations!
There is no need to say that Japanese food is absolutely delicious. We love the Soba noodle soups are at lunch during field work days, all kinds of tempuras, tofu dishes such as Agadashi tofu and the super fresh seafood. There are also many tasty fruits and veggies. The local citrus Shinquesar as juice and ice cream and the Goya bitter melon are our absolute favourite. The Okinawan islands have also many local specialties such as sahimi of many kinds of local fish, peanut tofu as well as (for people with good nerves) goat sashimi and pork knuckles. And let´s not forget the local Aguu pork which is served for example as a fantastic ginger pork set meal including sahimi, soup and seaweed. Oishi!
Ginger pork set meal
Goat Sashimi
Local fish
Seafood Sashimi
This year, Liz, Diana, Philipp and Annika joined again our Japanese collaborators from the Hatta lab (Tokyo), Ueno lab (Okazaki) and Maruyama lab (Sendai) at Sesoko Marine Station on Okinawa to collect coral larvae for comparative experiments in the field. Coral were collected on the 1st of June around Sesoko island and transferred to the water tables. Over the next few days, night snorkelling to watch out for spawning on the reef right in front of the station started. As predicted by the team leader Masayuki Hatta, Acropora corals spawned during the night of the 6th of June and after a busy night of gamete collection and mixing sperm and eggs for fertilization, coral embryos developed into planula larvae which were used for experiments. 4 days after fertilization, coral larvae are ready to be ship and, after a fun night out with delicious Japanese food and beer at our favorite Izakaya in Nago City, our Japanese colleagues went back home to continue their experiments at their home institutes. The Guse lab continued to enjoy the snorkelling and working at Sesoko for another week trying to learn as much as possible about the natural coral reef habitats and rearing coral larvae and metamorphosed polyps. We also brought some coral babies home and hope to keep them happy and alive in Heidelberg. Anyways, we all hope to be back in 2018 to witness that amazing event of synchronous coral spawning induced by the lunar cycle that occurs only once every year.
The reef at Sesoko Marine Station
One of our main activities: snorkeling
Collected corals in water table
Coral are setting to get ready for releasing their gametes
Monitoring the spawning & collecting gamtes
Lab work during spawning night
Izakaya night to celebrate a successful coral spawning 2017
