News
January 2021
New paper just published in Molecular Biology of the Cell! We collaborated with Keisuke Ishihara, Jan Brugués and Tim Mitchison to study polymerization of microtubules in asters. It nicely shows the power of differential imaging to study dynamic processes in crowding environment!
December 2020
- A stressful 2020 comes to an end and Natalia, Christian and Batir will leave the group to start new endeavors. All the best to you!
- New paper now out in PNAS! ADAP1 has long been considered to be an adaptor for PIP3 transport, contributing to neuronal polarity. Christian and Albert from the group found that PIPs are actually release factors that displace ADAP1 from the motor!
Instead, our results suggest a model where KIF13B acts in concert with PIP3 to distribute, deposit, and activate ADAP1, which in turn acts as a GAP to switch off ARF6 and thereby controls dendrite branching.

September 2020

Zane Alsberga joined the lab as a research technician, welcome!

The second student from the group defended his thesis today. Congratulations to Paulo for his great work!

August 2020

Gabriel Brognara joined the lab to work on the mechanism of Rab5 activation, welcome!
June 2020

Urban successfully defended his thesis, congratulations Dr. Bezeljak!

March 2020
- New website is online! The old one can still be found here.
- Due to the Coronavirus, the lab has shut down for now. We’ll be back at the bench in a couple of weeks. In the meantime the lab meeting happens on Zoom!

February 2020
- Paulo’s paper describing our method to quantify FtsZ treadmilling is now published in Methods in Cell Biology! Find the code on Paulo’s Github.
- Natalia’s and Philipp’s paper is featured on the cover of Nature Microbiology!
- The website of the Biochemistry groups at IST Austria is now online, visit it here: biochemistry.ist.ac.at
January 2020
- Lukasz and Isabel joined our group today, welcome!
- Our paper on the dynamic coupling between treadmilling FtsZ filaments and cell division proteins has been published in Nature Microbiology!
- Natalia also wrote a blog post on our story for the Nature Research Microbiology Community, find it here!

December 2019
- Our fanatastic technician Mar won the yearly award for “Outstanding Scientific Support” at IST Austria, congratulations!
- Paulo’s paper on how ZapA modulates the architecture of FtsZ filament bundles has been published in to the Nature Communications!

November 2019
Martin has been selected to the EMBO YIP program!

September 2019
Urban has studied the emergent properties of a Rab5 activation network in vitro. We found cooperative activation, bistability and activation waves!

Find the preprint “Stochastic activation and bistability in a Rab GTPase regulatory network” on BioRxiv!
June 2019
Great food and science at our “Loose lab symposium” at Tulbinger Kogel!
April 2019
Natalia, Phillip and Paulo attended the Cell Biology of Prokaryotes conference at the Banz Abbey! Natalia was selected to give a talk and Paulo won the 1st poster prize, congratulations!
March 2019
The preprint to Paulo’s paper is online! He studied how ZapA modulates the architecture of a membrane-bound FtsZ cytoskeletal network. To our surprise, ZapA strongly affects the architecture of FtsZ filament bundles, but has no influence on treadmilling dynamics. Find the preprint on BioRxiv!

January 2019
Batirtze joined the lab as a Postdoc today, welcome!
January 2015 – December 2018
For other news please check the old website!