Our second Research Unit Meeting in Leipzig was held at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). In the workshop we focused on different perspectives from evolutionary biology, ecology, genomics and chemistry to discuss the evolutionary emergence and maintenance of chemical diversity in plants.
We had exciting and insightful talks by our invited guest speakers Omer Nevo (idiv), Susan Whitehead (Virginia Tech), Dietrich Ober (Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel), Mike Speed (University of Liverpool), Pengjuan Zu (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich).
Steffen Neumann from IPB Halle gave us a great introduction into MetaboLights and ChEBI. We also got first hand insights from Claire O'Donovan and Thomas Payne of the Metabolomics team at EMBL-EBI.
Make your data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and open!
The online workshop with Sabine Blackmore dealt with challenges, ways and chances of an Academic Career and the implicit gender stereotypes and biases in academia. After insightful discussions there was also time to reflect on the FOR 3000, own biases and how to raise awareness and improve.
For the first time (almost) all members of the Chemodiversity Research Unit met in Marburg. The goal of this workshop was to discuss and develop a general framework of chemodiversity.
We had inspiring talks by invited guest speakers Renee Borges (Indian Institute of Science) and Tobias Köllner (Max-Planck-Insitute for Chemical Ecology).
The scientific illustration workshop with Jo Richers provided the Young Investigators of FOR 3000 with a hands on experience of how to improve the ability to analyze and create useful illustrations.
We had our second meeting of the Research Unit via zoom. It was exciting to exchange the latest updates on the projects, discuss method issues and brainstorm on the numerous options that are out there to measure volatiles.
The Solanum dulcamara plants at the experimental station in Bad Lauchstädt are already visited by pollinators and flea beetles. We are looking forward to see what the team around Nicole van Dam and Redouan Adam Anaia will find out about the ecological consequences of chemodiversity in this fascinating plant species.