After 4 years of hard work and a broad training in multiple techniques from chemistry and biology Kasia succesfully defended her PhD titled Chemoenzymatic Synthesis and Immunological studies of Xylosylated N-glycans on the 7th of June at the University of the Basque Country in San Sebastian. Congratulations and all the best for your postdoc in London! Here a foto of freshly baked Dr. Brzezicka with the jury (from left to right) Toni Planas, Ron Hokke, special guest Manuel Martin-Lomas and Jesus Jimenez-Barbero after the defense waiting for lunch.

A few days ago, on the 18th of May we had a visit from Juan-Ma Falcón, a research group leader and Ikerbasque professor from close-by  CICbioGUNE research center in Bilbao to give a talk titled  “Exosomes: metabolic nano-machines encoding complex signals”. Juan-Ma is a long-standing collaborator of our group and we are jointly exploring the effect of glycosylation on exosome targeting employing lectin arrays and different approaches for engineering exosome glycosylation. In his seminar Juan-Ma highlighted exosomes as our bodies own nanotechnology approach for the tissue specific delivery of metabolites, RNA and proteins from a source cell. We were so busy discussing science that we forgot to take a picture during his visit. Here is an archive foto of Juan Falcón.

Immunoshape fellow Silvia Achilli from the lab of Prof. Franck Fieschi, Grenoble visited our group for a very productive 2-week research stay. Here she is together with her tutor Sonia Serna (r).

Prof. Bjoern Christensen from the Department of Biotechnology at NTNU University in Troendheim, Norway and currently on sabbatical leave at the University of Bordeaux visited our lab to present his research on  biomaterials made from marine polysaccharides and to discuss lines for future collaboration.

Our US patent application on the lectin array blotting method titled  Method for the Characterisation of Intermolecular Interactions has been granted!