Lab News
Congratulations to Emma for winning a talk prize at Students on Stage, the annual symposium hosted and organized by The Functional Genomics Center Zürich (FGCZ).
The aim of this event is to provide PhD students with a platform to showcase their work and how omics approaches, in collaboration with the FGCZ, have supported their research.
We are very happy to welcome not one but two new PhD students to our Lab!
Chia-Yin grew passionate about fungal biology while working on her Master's thesis, which she carried out in our Lab as a visiting student from the University of Heidelberg. She will now do research on the fundamentals of fungal multicellularity.
Elena joined our group after successfully completing a research intership in the Piel's Lab, where she worked on Nonribosomal Peptides. Her PhD project will focus on fungal natural products.
On the 25th of April, the Künzler Lab went on its annual group excursion, which took place in beautiful St. Gallen this year.
We explored the nature over a Fox trail and visited St. Gall's Abbey Library and the Textile Museum, where we learnt more about the region's rich history and economy.
Already looking forward to next year's outing!
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!
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.
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!