One year anniversary of the Üstün Lab

Exactly one year ago I was entering the building of the Center for Plant Molecular Biology, the ZMBP in Tübingen. I was humbled, intimidated, excited like a first years’ school kid and full of motivation to start my own lab. Since I started my PhD, I had this dream to become a group leader, to supervise PhD students & Postdocs and to transfer my knowledge and experience to younger people. Finally I achieved this goal, started “the Üstün Lab” without really anticipating how challenging but also rewarding it will be to fulfill this position.

I have to admit the beginning was tough, especially because you face many new administrative tasks and small obstacles that you were not aware of while being a PhD student or Postdoc. Luckily, I had a lot of support from all the people of our floor at the ZMBP and after a couple of months basically everything was settled to start off the lab. Beginning of the year, Paul Gouguet joined our team as a Postdoc and only one month after him I had the excitement to welcome my very first PhD student, Gautier Langin. Finally our small team was there, out in the world of science, trying to discover novel findings. Within these first months we had some failures like non-significant qPCRs, failed clonings, contaminated MS plates or failed crosses. But these were just minor setbacks and looking back I remember our amazing RNAseq data set with a lot of new candidates connecting proteasome regulation with other pathways or novel surprising findings on the interplay between autophagy and vesicle trafficking 🙂 Watching your team members presenting their newest data at progress meetings or symposia is a completely rewarding feeling especially when you see how your team members embrace their projects and grow into them!

During these months we also grew together as a lab, had a lot of fun at our regular beer happy hour at the ZMBP or during small lab outings in lovely Tübingen. I guess that one of this years highlights was that all members of our lab attended the IS-MPMI in Glasgow having an amazing time full of science and other nice activities there.

Overall, it was a very exciting year for the Üstün Lab establishing our little group, starting new journeys and collaborations. I am grateful for my two excellent team members and we hope to expand our team in the near future with a new PhD student. I hope and believe that this next year holds many new findings, surprises and adventures for the Üstün Lab. Stay tuned for more news in the future!