I had a great time attending the Copenhagen Bioscience Conference on Plant-microbe Interactions for enhanced crop resilience. I truly had good discussions on my research and in general on all the topics covered in the conference. I also won a poster prize on my poster that I presented in the conference. Special thanks to all the organizers involved, all the presenters who presented their work and to Novo Nordisk Foundation for organizing such a great workshop.
I have recently participated in the Metabolomics workshop organized by EMBO at the Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands. This course has provided an overview of key issues that affect metabolomics studies, handling datasets and procedures for the analysis of metabolomics data using bioinformatics tools. It was delivered using a mixture of lectures, computer-based practical sessions and interactive discussions. The course provided a platform for discussion of the key questions and challenges in the field of metabolomics, from study design to metabolite identification. Special thanks to the organizers Reza Salek (Bruker GmbH, Germany), Jos Hageman (Wageningen University and Research), Ron Wehrens (Wageningen University and Research) and all the trainers.
I recently attended the annual symposium organized by Max Plank society for Checmical Ecology, Jena on their 25th anniversary. It was a great event and I had a chance to meet Sarah O’Connor (Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis), Jonathan Gershenzon (Department of Biochemistry), Jakob Franke (Hannover University), Sandra Irmisch (Leiden University, The Netherland), Eric Schranz (Wageningen University, The Netherlands) and Radhika Venkatesan (Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, Kolkata, India). I also got a chance to catch up with some old friends. I would like to congratulate Max Plank on their 25th anniversary and also like to thank for organizing such a great event.
I am very excited to share our recently published review article on “Integrative omics approaches for biosynthetic pathway discovery in plants” in Natural Product Reports. We have been working on this review for quite a while but I am very pleased to see how this work has shaped up. Design of the paper was conceived by all co-authors, which literally changed multiple times. Later we recived some constructive comments/feedback from the reviewers due to which it eventually turned out in a very good flow. With this work we have laid the foundation of plant-based integrative omics research to explore metabolic potential of plants and its regulation in the groups of Marnix Medema, Justin Van der Hooft & Saskia van Wees. So watch out for the new products that will be out soon under this research umbrella. Once again I would like to thank them for such an amazing support.
The bioinformatics group at WUR recently organized a two-days retreat at Hapert, The Netherlands. It was a lovely location amidst beautiful country side. The retreat mainly comprised of social events and scientific flash talks. I presented a flash talk on my research as a part of the NWO Groot project and also delivered a workshop on teams/project management in academia. The retreat allowed all the department members to interact closely with their fellow workers and group leaders in an informal way.
I have recently presented my work at the BioSB 2022 conference in Lunteren, the Netherlands, on the integrative omics using MEANtools (MEtabolite ANticipation tools) to discover biosynthetic pathways in plants.
Felicia C. Wolters defended her master dissertation (Master of Science, Major Phytopathology and Entomology) on the topic "Evolution of the Hydroxygeranyllinalool Diterpene Glycoside Pathway in Solanaceae". This work was jointly supervised by Iris Kappers (Plant physiology, WUR), Marnix Medema (Bioinformatic group, WUR) and me. Congratulations to Felicia on her successful defense and good luck for future scientific adventures.
We have presented a poster in the fourth edition of the X-omics festival “the future of multi-omics research is now!” on Monday April 11th 2022 https://x-omics.nl/festival/festival-2022. It was a great event and very well organized. Scientific poster session allowed us to network with others working with similar goals and our poster on MEANtools, Integrative omics for the discovery of biosynthetic pathways using MEANtools (MEtabolite ANticipation tools) was awarded the best poster prize of 2022.