Alumni

Laure David is a postdoc in the Plant Biochemistry group of Sam Zeeman at ETH Zurich. Her research focuses on regulation of starch metabolism. For the CASS project, she also analyses starch and cell wall properties among different accessions of cassava to study how these traits affect end-product quality. In collaboration with IITA researchers, Laure successfully conducted the first confined field trial of the project in Nigeria. Here, cassava lines with reduced starch remobilization upon pruning were investigated. Laure successfully demonstrated that the plants indeed displayed lower starch remobilization upon sink to source transition and thus exhibited higher starch content at harvest time.

Starch metabolism / Starch-quality / Natural variation / Arabidopsis / Cassava

David is a Postdoc in Alisdair Fernie’s Group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Germany. David’s research interests focus on guard cell metabolism and metabolic regulation of photosynthesis. Within the CASS project, David is investigating the source-sink metabolic changes.

Photosynthesis | Stomatal regulation | Source-sink interactions | Metabolic Regulation

Mark Stitt is Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam-Golm, Germany and heads the Department ‘Metabolic Networks’.

He uses systems, biochemical and physiological approaches to study the relation between the circadian clock, metabolism and growth in Arabidopsis and crop plants, as well as the function of signaling pathways especially that of the sugar-signaling metabolite trehalose-6-phosphate. This research provides information that can be used to model the dynamic links between gene expression, protein synthesis and turnover, metabolism, energy costs and growth. A growing interest is to apply these approaches to plants growing in natural or simulated natural environments. He is also interested in the regulation of photosynthesis in different environmental conditions and different crop and wild species.

Within CASS he applies ‘omics methods, especially robotized measurements of enzyme activities, to characterize the metabolic capacity of Cassava and search for cultivar differences in performance. He is also interested to understand the adaptations that allow the high rates of photosynthesis in this C3 species.

Patrick Klemens was a PostDoc in the lab of Prof. Ekkehard Neuhaus at the Technical University Kaiserslautern.  Patrick was interested in plant membrane transport and crop research. He severed the CASS project from 2014 – 2019. He recently left the project and moved to industry.

All the best for the future Patrick!

Nick Morales was a PhD candidate with Prof. Dr. Lukas Muller at the Boyce Thompson Insitute Ithaka, New York. He has since completed his PhD and left the project to persue new challenges.

Dr. Pascal Schläpfer was part of Prof. Wilhelm Gruissem´s Team at ETH Zurich working on the establishment of a genome-scale metabolic model for cassava source-sink metabolism.

Kelvin Acebron is a PhD student at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. His study focuses on understanding the temporal dynamics of photosynthesis in a leaf level using Solar-Induced Fluorescence (SIF). This involves understanding the mechanistic link between Solar-Induced Fluorescence (SIF) and Photochemistry as affected by different physiological mechanisms of Non Photochemical Quenching (NPQ). The first part of his research was focused on a model plant Arabidopsis thaliana having specific mutations in NPQ.  He then decided to transfer from a model plant to Cassava crop to focus on understanding the NPQ adjustments in fluctuating light as well as its consequence on photosynthesis and SIF signal.

Janine Klima supported CASS scientific projects from 2016 – 2019. She was especially interested in cassava storage root development but actively supported many different projects and field trial activities.

All the best for the future Janine!

Juliane is a PostDoc in the lab of Prof. Uwe Rascher at the Forschungszentrum Jülich since December 2020.  Juliane is interested in measuring crop traits with optical sensors mounted on UAVs (drones). In her work she focuses on deriving ctructural paramaters from UAV point clouds, and linking optical remote sensing signals, such as derived vegetation indices and chlorophyll fluorescence, to better understand plant photosynthesis.