Fakultät für Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften

Bergische Universität Wuppertal

Molecular Cell Biology and Microbiology

Our research focuses on basic understanding of genetic and epigenetic mechanisms involving ribonucleic acid (RNA).

NEWS

February 2024

Annula meeting of the DGP in Haltern am See

Great talks, great people and a poster prize: nice to meet the crowd again

October 2023

Our first metal-tox paper is published in cooperation with the Bornhost group in Chemosphere:

Microbial impact to environmental toxicants Ni(II) and Co(II): Joint toxicity and cellular response in Paramecium

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2023.140434

July 14th 2023

Franzi was honored with the Karl Gottlieb Grell award for outstanding PhD thesis at the joint meeting of ISOP, ECOP and DGP in Vienna.

July 13th 2023

Marcello  gave a talk at the ISOP/ECOP/DGP in Vienna about dsRNA amplification. There is an arrow towards the speaker, the hall was huge :-).

December 9th 2022

Congrats to Franzi who successfully defended her PhD thesis in Saarbrücken: back to the beginning!  A pleasure to listen to her talk and to meet old friends.

November 2022

Our new paper is published about an old an ongoing question on the evolution of surface antigens:

Pirritano, Yakovlela, Potekhin and Simon:

Species specific duplication of surface antigen genes in Paramecium

https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms10122378

June 2022

The 41st annual meeting of the DGP [summer edition] is appraoching.

12.-15. July, Kardinal Schulte Haus, Bergisch Gladbach

We warmly welcome you to the 41st annual conference of the DGP. Due to the Covid pandemic, the meeting will take place exceptionally in summer. We hope to be able to meet again in person and discuss science, research and much more.

Thanks to the numerous sponsors, there will be reduced fees for 25 students and doctoral students: the only requirement is the active contribution in the form of a poster or a lecture.

Likewise, Tuesday’s workshop on RNAseq will be free of charge for the first 40 undergraduate and graduate students who register. Postdocs only pay the subsistence costs. The workshop will give an introduction to all aspects of RNA seq, starting with the isolation of long and short RNA, the various methods of library preparation, the function and specification of the sequencing platform and an introduction to bioinformatics principles.

The conference includes a special session on the subject of endosymbiosis, an exciting area that is making great strides in many respects. We invite you to lectures in this area. Of course, all other topics of the DGP are represented at the conference, from morphology to diversity to genetics.

We hope to see everyone in Bergisch Gladbach in July. The hotel is easily accessible both by public transport and by car and offers us an ideal conference environment.

For questions, please write us:
dgp22[at]uni-wuppertal.de
Franzi & Martin

See details and the program at the meetings website.

April 2022

See our new review on Paramecium epigenetics, together with Jens Boenigk from University Duisburg/Essen:

Paramecium epigenetics in development and proliferation

Franziska Drews, Jens Boenigk, Martin Simon

March 2022

Our new paper is published in Genome Research:

Broad domains of histone marks in the highly compact Paramecium macronuclear genome

Franziska Drews, Abdulraham Salhab, Sivarajan Karunanithi, Miriam Cheaib, Martin Jung, Marcel Schulz, Martin Simon

October 2021

Our new paper is published:

Drews F., Karunanithi S, Götz U, Marker S, DeWijn R, Pirritano M, Rodrigues-Viana AM, Jung M, Gasparoni G, Schulz MH, Simon M:

Two Piwis with Ago-like functions silence somatic genes at the chromatin level

 

July 2021

Franzi will give a talk at the 2021 Ciliate Molecular Biology meeting

Chromatin landscape of the Paramecium macronucleus: How do broad domains of histone marks, well positioned nucleosomes and Pol II orchestrate gene expression in a compact genome?”

June 2021

New textbook available: Boenigk, Biologie with several chapters by Martin

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