🔊 Latest

This last week, Anna Doblhofer (Bachelor student at the University of Vienna) joined the group for her Bachelor internship. Anna will be taking over barcoding of leeches we have collected and received from different sites… read more

Along with Anna Michalik & Piotr Łukasik (Jagiellonian University), we will embark on a large-scale collaborative project funded by the Austrian Science fund (Austria) and the National Science Centre (Poland) through the Weave initiative, which… read more

In a collaboration with Anouk Willemsen and led by Dominik (VEE lab), we reconstructed high-quality genomes from diverse Waste-water treatment plants (61 novel nucleocytoviruses, 15 virophages and 14 polinton-like viruses). We aimed to study interactions… read more

Aphids typically rely on the obligate symbiont Buchnera, but several lineages have acquired additional co-obligate symbionts, most commonly Serratia symbiotica. Through phylogenetic analyses, we found that a clade of Cinara aphids shows strict co-speciation between… read more

This last week, I had the pleasure to attend the annual “Microbiology day“, a meeting from the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in France, as a keynote speaker, spreading the word on bacterial symbioses in leeches. This meeting… read more

After a long hiatus, we are back in Slovenia! This past week Pegah and I went to the University of Ljubljana to join long-term collaborator Peter Trontelj and Maria Kolesnykova (М. Колесникова) in a sampling… read more

This week I was lucky to have been invited to talk at the Institute of Integrative Biology (IBZ) Seminar Series by the Vorburger’s group (Evolutionary Ecology). Got to talk about my favourite topics: aphids, leeches,… read more

Pegah was just awarded a Mobility Fellowship from the University of Vienna! This fellowship will enable Pegah to visit the “leech lab” at Kyoto University (Japan) led by Dr. Takafumi Nakano. During her visit she… read more

Thanks to the European Reference Genome Atlas initiative (ERGA) and their Biodiversity Genomics Europe project (BGE), a reference genome for the historical European southern medicinal leech Hirudo verbana Carena, 1820 has been sequenced and assembled… read more

This January I had the pleasure of visiting the LIIGH – UNAM, at my home city of Querétaro (México), where I was able to talk about the symbiosis research I have done throughout the years… read more