Almost unnoticed but really great the new publications of Foteini Pashalidou et al. in Ecology Letters, Luis Paniagua Voirol et al. in Applied and Environmental Microbiology and Frago et al. book chapter in Advances in Insect Physiology.
On April 20th we had our 7th meeting but our first online – due to the covid-19 outbreak. It went relatively smoothly and almost all members were present. We made quite some progress the last couple of months especially in Niccolo’s project on the genetics. Now that Lotte is back from maternity leave her project on the elicitor is getting back on track again!
Eddie Griese's second paper on 'Plant responses to butterfly oviposition partly explain preference-performance relationships on different brassicaceous species' is under review but the preprint is available on BioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/706044v1
10 years after collecting new Trichogramma wasps from passion-vine butterflies in a tropical rain-forest in Panama we manage to identify and describe them! Without no doubt, this is a classical Biosystematics publication!
On Monday 19th of November, our 5th user committee meeting took place. This meeting marked our halfway point, we are now two years underway with the NWO/TTW VIDI-funded project on pest-killing plants.
Compared to previous meetings, the Vidi team had decreased a bit in size, Setareh Mohammadin has gone on maternity leave, Gabriella Bukovinskine Kiss went to work full time at the Laboratory of Genetics, and visiting PhD student Xiuji Wang returned to China. Luckily, several students are joining our team in the coming weeks and a new research and education assistant is being recruited at the moment. Representatives of all companies in the user committee were present and gave good feedback on our results. We were also happy to see the addition of Klaas Bouwmeester to our committee. Klaas has a strong background in phytopathology and is now a researcher in the Biosystematics group.
Niccolò and Lotte presented their work of the last 7 months. Niccolo showed his work on screening a population of Brassica rapa for egg-triggered necrosis. With the help of many lab members a Brassica rapa population was screened for Large Cabbage White egg-triggered necrosis. Niccolo has also improved methods to perform automated imaging, segmentation and quantification of lesion size. His work will continue using this method to map the response in B. rapa. Lotte presented work on the identification of the elicitor of the egg-triggered response. She was able to zoom in on the compound that triggers the response in plants. In the coming months, both parts of the project promise to give exciting results. @LotteCaarls
In periode 6 (May-June) the Biodiversity of the Netherlands course started with 240 first-year Biology and Forest and Nature Conservation students. Assistant professor Sabrina Simon and me together with PhD student Thijmen Breeschoten and 7 student assistants teach the Fauna part on arthropod systematics and diversity. We visit 5 locations/habitats in the surroundings of Wageningen were students evaluate arthropod abundances. Many enthusiastic students with nets catching insects are all over the place!
