Another missed Christmas party…

It is nothing but a little bit of RNA with a protein shell, and yet it has changed our world dramatically. And we begin realizing that it may never be just like before. But perhaps, that is a good thing, and an essential one for our world. Of course, our Vertiefungs-Modul Biochemistry in January and February was severely affected, with too much online teaching, and we even skipped one of our Fortgeschrittenen-Module because the burden on the group was too high. But we again had excellent Bachelor students, Lara Lüneberg, Antonia Irion, Dominic Gogol, and Dominik Peters. Katharina Ost and Merle Diekmann finished their Master theses. Soofia Khanahmadi from Iran and Naivy Yuvicel Nava Cruz from Mexico defended their doctoral projects, and Margareta Hellmann, supported by a fellowship from Deutsche Studienstiftung, started hers. The Indo-German Bioeconomy International BMBF project smartBioS and the Public Private Partnership AIF project nanoControl both came to a successful end this year, while the Indo-German Bioeconomy International BMBF project Bio-Fun and the German-Norwegian Bioeconomy-in-the-North BMBF project LignoLIPP as well as the parallel projects BYPROVALUE (NRC) and co-Fun (DAAD) have continued successfully, though slowly. During the last two months of the year, we even had a guest from Norway, Dr. Dana Bytusova, who brought precious samples from different fungi and analysed their cell walls. Perhaps not surprisingly in a difficult year, we had “only” eight papers published, but we are proud of each single one, and some more are currently in the review process, and some others are more or less ready for submission. Thus overall, the year was not a bad one scientifically, and it was certainly a good one personally given the high spirits and excellent internal and external cooperations we enjoyed. So we are looking ahead with good hopes and high expectations for an excellent and satisfying 2022.