It was a very intense, crazy, and exhausting year, with lots of ups and downs for our lab, but we managed to survive. We faced happy moments, difficult situations, rejections, and acceptance. This is just a small reflection about our lab life in 2021.
Publish, don’t perish.
Full of hopes we started 2021, posting our first preprint on biorxiv, in which we describe how a bacterial effector counteracts host autophagy by degrading an autophagy component, a project led by PhD student Jia Xuan Leong. We have spent more than 6 years to finalize this story, and this project made its way through various labs across the world, including Germany (Erlangen, Grossbeeren, Tübingen), Sweden (Uppsala) and the US. In the end we were excited to submit it in March to get peer reviewed. The process was very long (we lost 9 months), edifying (reviews improved our manuscript), but also painful. It showed us again that our publication system (or certain journals) may need a revamp. Luckily, there are very good other alternatives available out there and we are currently under review. Fingers crossed that 2022 starts with positive news. Fortunately, we received also good news regarding publications in 2021: one of the preprints with contributions from the Ustun Lab was accepted just before Christmas, you’ll soon hear from it. In 2022 we hope to finish Gautier’s and Paul’s stories and publish them as a preprint. Fingers crossed!
Our lab grows.
Managing a lab with various lab members and different projects is already challenging. Recruiting new team members to start their new projects is always a difficult task. The pandemic doesn’t make it easier. Nevertheless, beginning 2021, we started our search, and with the help of the entire lab we found new members, Shanshuo Zhu and Shiji Hou, to kickstart the ERC project DIVERSIPHAGY. Shanshuo and Shiji have promising results in their projects so far, and we hope to continue this in 2022. We also started a completely new project on the role of “P-Bodies in bacterial infection” with Manuel Gonzalez Fuente, who joined our lab as a postdoc with his own DFG funding from the Walter Benjamin Programme. All in all, it is great to see the group growing, different projects progressing and developing, even though we had limited space in the lab (thanks to the pandemic). The new year will again bring some changes to our group: We are very happy to welcome another postdoc in the new year, Margot Raffeiner (former PhD student in the Börnke Lab), who will join our ERC team, working on the autophagy degradome. Sadly, Shiji had to leave our lab by the end of the year, and we are currently trying to find a new postdoc to study plant microbiome and its influence on degradation pathways (you can find the ad here). Let’s see what other major changes will happen in 2022…to be continued!
Money, money, money.
Regarding grants for our lab, the year was pretty much focused to get approval for our project (“Specificity of proteasome regulation during plant immunity”) in the CRC1101 (“Molecular encoding of specificity in plant processes”), a research center, including labs from University of Tübingen, Heidelberg, Hohenheim and MPI Tubingen. Our lab was in a fortunate situation, as our PhD student Gautier Langin, working in this project since 2019, obtained exciting results that made it easy to develop the proposal for the third funding period of the CRC1101. After a positive evaluation in the summer, we got the final approval by the end of November. Full credits should go to all the amazing PhD students & Postdocs working in the different projects of the CRC1101 (I personally think that this always comes up short). Without their contributions the CRC1101 wouldn’t be there where it is now!
Tired of online meetings
Usually, in the pre-pandemic era, we would report about exciting meetings, international conferences, and networking events as well as huge social events. Especially not having any international conferences is affecting early career researchers a lot: It is crucial to present your science, to meet new people (future employees, collaborators, friends). Some of our lab members never went to international conferences. This is an essential part of building your own network and preparing yourself for your future. As much as online conferences are a great distraction, and a way to communicate your science (if you don’t present only published things), it misses the “social” part as most social interactions on Zoom or other platforms are impersonal. Our own lab meetings and journal clubs improved a lot when we started having in person meetings again. Our highlight of an in-person meeting was in November, when Yasin Dagdas, group leader at GMI Vienna, visited us, to participate in Gautier’s thesis advisory committee. We had great discussions about Gautier’s PhD project and future publication strategy that helped him a lot to focus his research. We hope for 2022 to have more in person meetings and small conferences.
Happy (we really mean this!) new year to everyone
Indeed, it was a very intense, tiring, sometimes exciting and sometimes challenging year for our team. We are glad that 2021 is over and we hope that 2022 brings many positive news (soon!) and experiences. The new year will definitely bring new adventures, big changes and challenges to the Üstün Lab but no doubt that our amazing team will manage this together.
The Üstün Lab is wishing everyone a happy new year and a fantastic start into 2022!
Highlights of the year
- Publishing our first preprint
- Welcoming new team members
- Yasin’s visit for Gautier’s TAC
- EURO2020 and kicktipp barbecue
- CRC1101 grant approved
- Having in person lab meetings again
- AlphaFold
- Results from various proteomics experiments
- our first scRNAseq experiment
- Christmas dinner & cocktails
- Suayb doing something with R
- Will tell you in 2022
Flops of the year:
- Rejected paper after 9 months
- Pandemic, pandemic, pandemic
- Online conferences (cancelled MPMI),