Gulzar discovered important new functions of a mitochondrial protease in adult neural stem cells during his time as a PhD student. His work was supported by the Cologne Graduate School of Ageing Research. Unfortunately personal contact was still limited due to corona regulations but we tried our best to celebrate this great day! Gulzar and his expertise will stay a little longer in the lab 😉 Needless to say: We are very happy about that.

Christmas time is ‚Glühwein‘ time. Merry Christmas to everyone 😉

We visited our former colleague Patric at the Leica headquarters in Wetzlar. We were invited to test a new microscope which will be available for customers in the coming year. It was a pleasure to get to know the company and the internal construction and designing steps which are necessary for the implementation process.

We decided to go for a team event called „buddy bash“ during our lab trip day and it was  a good decision 😉 It was a day full of adventure and laughter. We split in two teams and competed in plenty of mini games against each other. We needed physical power, intelligence and a good team spirit to complete the tasks. The „happy wild types“ were leading before the last game but the „(sick) knockouts“ fought till the end and could tie the score. So everyone could enjoy the early dinner at the brewery without grief ;).

This year the SFN conference took place in Chicago and it was all about mitochondria – at least for the Bergami Lab. Matteo and Elisa were invited to talk about their work in the Minisymposium „Pleiotropic Mitochondria: The Influence of Mitochondria on Neuronal Development and Disease“. Kristiano (not in the picture) presented his work about mitochondria dynamics in interneurons during the poster sessions.

Oh happy day! Today Jana defended her PhD thesis. She presented her work and answered comprehensively to all the curious questions of her committee members Matthias Hammerschmidt, Aleksandra Trifunovic and certainly Matteo. So we could finally reward her with a fantastic PhD hat. Matteo seemed to be quite happy to add his first PhD student to the pool of PhD graduates 😉 Her work on astroglial mitochondrial fusion proteins and their important role upon brain injury is published on the preprint server biorivx. Check it out: Göbel et al. 2019