Dioscuri Centre for Physics and Chemistry of Bacteria
Experimental and theoretical research on the population dynamics and evolution of bacteria
Last week we said farewell to Amanda, our long-term visitor from Ploen. We will all miss Amanda – both due to her scientific contributions as well as her culinary skills! However, we will continue to collaborate with Amanda and we hope to see her again very soon (in Ploen in September, then again in Warsaw some time next year).
This week all Dioscuri Centre leaders were invited to Munich to visit the Max Planck Society headquarters. The programme of the visit was packed with events, but we found a moment to have a joint photo with the President of the MPG, Professor Martin Stratmann. Professor Stratmann was instrumental in creating the Dioscuri Programme. Our visit coincided with the 5-year anniversary of the programme, which explains the cake in the photo below!
A new position for A technical specialist (MSc or MScEng) with experience in microfluidics and/or optics has just been advertised in our Centre!
You can find out more here.
Some of us decided to go to the opera to see The Magic Flute. It was a rather extraordinary performace, with actors playing in front of a white screen on which animated decoration would be displayed. I cannot share any images from the performace (recording was forbidden) but I can share a photo of us standing in the lobby of the opera house.
I am delighted to say that our Dioscuri Centre has been awarded an NCN grant (call OPUS22) to study the transition from genetic to phenotypic antibiotic resistance in bacterial mutants. The image below conveys the main idea.
Many thanks to Elin Lilia, Aleksandra Sadlocha, and Witold Postek who performed experiments to generate preliminary data to support the proposal. Well done guys!
We will soon have some openings for post-docs, so stay tuned!
This week we welcomed Dr Viktoria Blavatska from the Institute for Condensed Matter Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Lviv. Viktoria has come to us thanks to the financial support from a joint initiative of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS).
Viktoria’s background is in theoretical statistical physics, but she plans to use the visit to explore new research areas and work on theory aspects of some biological projects we have been pursuing in the group. Perhaps we even manage to convert her to a biologist (I am only half-joking π )?
Spring has finally arrived to Warsaw, and some of us decided to celebrate it by going on a short bike trip to a sort of a beer garden near the Vistula River. As evidenced by the picture below, food options were limited but we still enjoyed the trip! The weather was excellent, the company was great, and the city bicycles performed better than expected.
After some protracted battle with stubborn components, we have finally managed to obtain first images from our single-plane illumination microscope, which we have been building for some time. The image on the left is a 100 um green fluorescent bead from our “phantom sample” (beads embedded in transparent plastic). The resolution isn’t great yet but we hope we can substantially improve it over the next weeks.
We welcome two guests from our German partner institution: Amanda de Azevedo Lopes, and Michael Raatz. They both work in the department run by Prof. Arne Traulsen at MPI Evo Bio in Ploen. We have already started working on two theoretical projects motivated by our experimental work on urinary tract infections. I expect some very interesting science to come out of it!
Today we celebrated Fat Thursday – the day marking the last Thursday of Carnival. Polish tradition calls for doughnuts (“pΔ czki”) and angel wings (“faworki”), but since our group is multi-national, we have expanded the selection of food to other things, see the photo below. It was unfortunate that this year the festival coincided with Russia invading Ukraine, but we tried to be as cheerful as possible, considering the situation.
Dioscuri Centre for Physics and Chemistry of Bacteria 