Lab news

Three researchers, three paths – one strong research culture

3. juni 2025:

Professor Gregers Rom Andersen, Associate Professor Peter Ebert Andersen, and Tenure Track Assistant Professor Vera van der Weijden have each received personal grants to support their ambitious research projects over the coming years.

New publication

New paper about piRNA pathway evolution

24. april 2025:

New work from the lab, spearheaded by PhD student Sebastian Riedelbauch, reveals how the protein machinery that defends the fly genome against parasitic DNA keeps reinventing itself. By testing protein interactions across five fruit fly species spanning 40 million years of evolution, we found that some connections between these essential proteins stay rock-solid, others co-evolve in lockstep, and some are completely species-specific – showing that evolution constantly tinkers with the wiring of this critical defense system even as its overall architecture is preserved. Read the paper in it's final form at EMBO J

New publication

Discovery of the tPAF complex in our lab's first publication!

8. October, 2024:

Major milestone: our lab's first paper from our first PhD student, Astrid Pold Vilstrup is now published! We discovered that developing sperm cells in fruit flies use their own private version of a universal gene-reading machine. This testis-specific complex, called tPAF, is built from duplicate copies of a well-known transcription regulator and turns out to be essential for properly shutting down genes at the right spot. Without it, transcription runs off-track into neighboring genes, expression of key fertility genes on the Y chromosome falters, and cell division goes haywire — making the flies completely sterile. Reads all about it in Genes & Development.