Molecular Basis of Coral Symbiosis
The Guse lab has a new member: Hannelore, the Anemone! Hannelore has recently arrived from the Pringle lab in Stanford and became friends with Karl-Heinz right away. When Hannelore is not discussing science and politics with Karl-Heinz, she enjoys sitting on the lab computer watching people passing by the lab. (P.S.: Hannelore was hand-made by Kristen in the Pringle Lab and is the sweetest thing we have ever seen. Dankeschön, Kristen!)
From the 12-18 of May, we (Annika and Liz) travelled to the KAUST Red Sea Research Center to visit our collaborator Chris Voolstra. In addition to scientific discussion, we also had the chance to participate in coral spawning survey night dives around the full moon in May. Thanks to the enormous help of Postdoctoral Fellow Jess Bouwmeester and MSc Student Remy Gatins in the Berumen lab, we had a great time and learned a a lot about coral spawning. This knowledge will be very helpful for our own field work. Thanks so much, girls!
The impressive KAUST campus
Choosing fish in a restaurant
Sunset
Collecting worms in the mangroves
Liz setting up her dive gear
Remy & Jess on the boat before departure
The trip to our dive site
The dive site: Fasar Reef before sunset (okay, you can´t really see the reef)
The light from the dive torches close to the boat at the end of the dive
Day diving is also fun of course
The Guse Lab was awarded the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (CIG) to fund our work on cnidarian endosymbiosis using Aiptasia as a model system.
Liz Hambleton has decided to join our team as a new Postdoctoral Fellow. Welcome Liz, we are happy to have you back in Heidelberg!
3D-Images of Aiptasia anemones, taken with the Zeiss Z.1 light sheet microscopy (LSM) in Fiskebäckskil during the EMBO course Marine Animal Models in Evolution & Development, is showcased on the Zeiss webpage. Anemones are pretty cool, aren´t they?
Last Thursday, Philip successfully defended his MSc thesis. Congratulations an good luck for your future!
Last week, the Guse Lab went together with some folks from the Holstein, Grossmann and Evers Labs to the city center to enjoy some “Glühwein” and/or “Feuerzangenbowle” on the Heidelberg Christmas Market. Steak with onions was also somewhat popular…
It was about time to finally warm up the newly established junior labs at COS Heidelberg. Therefore, the Evers, Johnston, Gaquerel, Grossmann, Guse, Pereira and Wolf lab got together to transform INF329 into a party-mile. Everybody at COS was invited. DJ Engrailed performed at his best. Extraordinary dance moves could not be banned on photos. Strong work, guys!
Recently, Madeline Bucher and Iliona Wolfowicz have joined the Guse Lab. Madeline has spend her summer on a boat in Iceland doing some whale research and will now start her PhD work on Aiptasia development. Iliona has come all the way from sunny Portugal to work on coral symbiosis in Heidelberg, which will hopefully be sunny again by next summer… Madeline and Iliona are both part of two prestigious PhD programs. Madeline has been selected into the Heidelberg “Hartmut Hoffmann-Berling International Graduate School of Molecular and Cellular Biology” (HBIGS) and Iliona is a member of the Graduate Program in Basic and Applied Biology (GABBA) of the University of Porto. Congratulations & Welcome!
A new paper published by the Grossman, Pringle and Palumbi labs from Stanford University was published in Current Biology (PMID:24012312). Typically, coral bleaching is induced by the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) under high light conditions. Interestingly, Tolleter and colleagues find corals as well as Aiptasia respond to periods of heat with bleaching even in the absence of light. The so-called dark bleaching could be an additional mechanism compromising the fidelity of coral reefs during the summer. The paper also nicely demonstrates how lab experiments using Aiptasia as a model system for corals complement coral field studies.
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