News

Soft- and biological-physics Early-Career Researcher meeting – 23/02/2023

We are organizing a one day in-person meeting for early-career researchers (ECRs, PhD students and postdocs) working on soft-matter and biological physics/chemistry in our institute. The agenda of this meeting is ECR-driven and based on a survey done among the ECRs from different groups in our institute at the end of 2022. The objectives of…

First Dioscuri-made preprint

We have finally started drafting papers based on research made exclusively by Dioscuri researchers! Our first preprint paper is Evolutionary adaptation is facilitated by the presence of lethal genotypes,(Viktoria Blavatska, Bartlomiej Waclaw). It is a theory paper on how biological evolution is affected by lethal mutations that create non-viable organisms. In contrast to the naive…

A simple model of cancer cell response to chemotherapy

Remember what Pragyesh found regarding the response of glioblastoma cells to chemotherapy with temozolomide (TMZ)? Here is it again (see the picture on the left): cells respond to the drug with a delay. Now, thanks to the computer simulation (middle- and right-hand pictures) developed by Saumil Shah (a visitor from Ploen) we can model this…

New team member

Despite the gloomy weather outside, a very warm welcome to our new team member – Klaudia Staśkiewicz! She will work in the Dioscuri as a technical specialist helping our team with their experiments. Klaudia is a biologist with experience in microfluidics and we will certainly enlist her to projects that combine microbiology and microfluidics, such…

Dioscuri – MPI Evolutinary Biology meeting

Last week we spent a very intense 5 days visiting our collaborators in Ploen in the north of Germany. Amanda Azevedo and Michael Raatz – local organizers who coincidentally also spent some time at the Dioscuri Centre – put up together a very nice programme of scientific talks, discussion sessions, and a few social events.…

Only one day until our group trip to Ploen

This Sunday the whole Dioscuri Centre is going to Ploen (north of Germany) to participate in a research workshop (5-9 September). This is the first time since the opening of our centre that we can physically visit our collaborators at MPI Evolutionary Biology. We have already had a few guests from Ploen (Amanda, Michael) and…

Response of cancer cells to chemotherapy

Pragyesh did a clonogenic assay to assess change in the number of colonies formed by different cell lines in response to various doses of temozolomide (TMZ) treatment. The graph above shows the change in the number of the colonies formed as compared to the DMSO-treated cells. We further treated cells with various doses of TMZ…

“What do you do in your job”

A few weeks ago we recorded a video featuring my daughter and some of the Dioscuri scientists. Julia (8 years old) interviews us about our work. I think everyone will agree that she is the star of this short video! Many thanks to everyone who participated in the production process (Magda, Asia, Pragyesh, Ilyas, Dominik)

Goodbye Amanda!

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…


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