Lab News

On Thursday 10 April 2025, Lukas successfully defended his thesis titled Characterization and applications of peptidases involved in fungal RiPP biosynthesis.

Huge congratulations, Dr. Sonderegger!

We are proud of you and wish you the brightest future ahead, you will be missed!

Part of the Künzler Lab attended the 17th edition of the European Conference on Fungal Genetics, which took place in Dublin from 2-5 March 2025.

PhD students Emma, Shurui, and Blanka presented their latest findings concerning fungal signalling (Emma and Shurui) and physiology (Blanka) with their respective posters.

We are delighted to welcome Luca Lohmann to our Lab!

Luca is a Master's student in Biochemistry at ETH Zürich and this will be his second semester project. Under Emma's supervision, he will work on the antagonistic interaction between Coprinopsis cinerea and E. coli.

We wish him a great stay with us and the best of luck!

Domique Imhof recently joined our Lab for his Master's thesis as part of his Master's studies in Microbiology and Immunology at ETH Zürich.

The aim of his thesis, supervised by Blanka, is the characterization of septal pore cap constituents in the model mushroom Coprinopsis cinerea.

We wish Dominique a joyful and successful stay in our Lab!

Markus presented Shurui's poster at the annual meeting of the Fungal Molecular Biology Society of Japan (Okinawa, 3-4 Nov).

Shurui's latest results contribute to the genetic dissection of the antinematode defense response in Coprinopsis cinerea.

lukas-ripps — *Fig.1. almost shows Lukas (left) delivering a talk about Omphalotin A. The person identity was confirmed by Lukas himself.*

Well done Lukas for delivering a flashlight talk at the 2nd International Conference on RiPPs in Seoul, South Korea (Fig.1).

Lukas described how we characterized the macrocyclase responsible for the cyclization of Omphalotin A, a fungal natural product exhibiting strong toxicity against nematodes.

Congratulations to Shurui for winning the poster prize at the Kiel conference on Molecular Biology of Fungi 2024!

Shurui presented his latest findings concerning differences in anti-nematode defense across Coprinopsis cinerea monokaryotic strains.

Way to go!

On October 2, Markus delivered a seminar at the University of Tsukuba (Japan), where he is currently a visiting professor.

His talk provided an outlook of the group's latest results and future research directions.

We are happy to welcome Xiaoyu to the Lab for her internship until August 2025!

Xiaoyu is completing her Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences at Imperial College London and will be working on fungal-nematode interactions under Shurui Mai's supervision. Specifically, she will investigate the initiation and spatio-temporal regulation of the inducible anti-nematode defense response in Coprinopsis cinerea.

We wish her the very best of luck and a fantastic stay here in Switzerland!