Working at the Faculty of Biology at LMU means I have the pleasure of participating in the master on Evolution, Ecology and Systematics (EES). Every year a new cohort of enthusiastic students starts that originates from a wide variety of backgrounds and nationalities. The master is heavily research-focused, which means every semester the students need to perform a Individual Research Training (IRT) which is a great opportunity for me to every semester work with a group of enthusiastic and bright students! This semester I welcome three new faces and two familiar ones.

Linda Hagberg will study how in fission yeast, strains of opposite mating types that express the same pheromones and receptors are able to find each other and form successful matings.
Pilar Herrera will study reproductive isolation of a variety of natural fission yeast strains.
Mohammed Tawfeeq will be generating strains that mating-type independently have identical pheromone-receptor systems.

Franziska Brenninger and Augusto Liberti were IRT students in the previous semester and will continue for some time more. Together they applied for a Lehre@LMU Student Research Award to research the importance of pheromone production in mating competitions for mating-type switching and non-switching fission yeasts. The next few months they will perform large scale competition essays to test the role of the many copies of M-factor pheromones that naturally occur in the fission yeast genome, both during asexual and sexual reproduction.