Our lab is fascinated by the natural diversity harboured within plant species, and the role that this intraspecific variation plays in biotic interactions and rapid adaptation to changing environments. We love experiments, invasive plants, and our amazing Herbarium Tubingense!
We are commited to curiosity-driven, open and collaborative science, and we strive to be a diverse and inclusive lab community. We also have fun, drink a lot of coffee, and try to be decent people.
More about our current team, our research and publications, and our teaching.
And here comes Dr. Frank Reis! Only few days after his friend and office mate Junhee, Frank successfully defended his PhD thesis. In collaboration with the Kemen lab Frank studied effects of plant age, genotype and organ on the microbiome of Lotus corniculatus. Thank you Mika, Katja and Eric for the excellent questions, and well done, Frank! (June '25)
Congratulations, Dr. Jung! So happy that Junhee successfully defended his PhD thesis in which he tested, among others, how leaf bacteriome diversity impacts Arabidopsis plants, and whether increased temperature variability alters the Arabidopsis leaf microbiome. Junhee's project was part of the DFG SPP 2125 DECRyPT. Note the DNA helices on Junhee's knitted tie! (June '25)
Sustainable seed harvesting? A new paper in Conservation Biology, led by former lab member Anna Bucharova, and based on demographic data from 280 wild plant species in COMPADRE, shows how seed harvesting for ecological restoration threatens population survival particularly of short-lived plants, but that smarter harvesting guidelines will help. (May '25)
Goodbye Yuhan! After one year in our group, Yuhan Chen, a visiting PhD student (CSC-funded) from Beijing Forestry University, returned to China. Yuhan has been working on plasticity, biotic interactions and transgenerational effects of Phragmites australis. Thank you for the great collaboration, Yuhan (stayed tuned for our joint paper), and for being such a wonderful lab mate! (May '25)
PopBio 2025 in Prague. Corinna and Yuhan represent our group at the awsome 37th PopBio conference in Prague, enjoy the interesting science, good food and friendly atmosphere at this event, and present posters about their research. (May '25)
Outreach on the Schwäbische Alb. Oliver participates in a stakeholder event of the Biodiversity Exploratories where conservation managers and foresters exchanged with scientists about some research results, and about biodiversity management. During a forest excursion, Oliver explains how forest management affects the phenology of understory plants. (June '24)
Congratulations Dr. Galanti! After some serious grilling by the examination committee Dario successfully finished his PhD, got carried away by colleagues, and celebrated with colleagues, family, friends, and prosecco and cheese from Italy. Thank you for the amazing work (here, here and here), for being such a great colleague, and good luck with the postdoc at Kew! (June '24)
Paper on transgenerational effects in Nature Communications. Oliver coauthors a new paper, led by former student Yuanye Zhang at Xiamen University, that confirms the broad prevalence of environmentally-induced heritable changes of plant phenotypes, and links genotypic variation in these effects to the abundance of transposons. (May '24)
'Achtungserfolg' in cycling competition. A team from our lab participates in the university-wide RadCHALLENGE (teams of five, three weeks, >1000 km). With their team 'Crop Rotation', Frank, Junhee, Madalin, Oliver and Sabine cycle 1494 km and achieve a good 35th place out of 121 teams!
PopBio 2024 in Frankfurt. Our lab participates in the 36th PopBio meeting, the annual conference of the plant population biology section of the German Ecological Society. Ramona and Frank gave talks; Junhee, Sulochana and Uta presented posters, and Madalin and Oliver were also there. The conference was hosted by former lab member Niek Scheepens and his team. (May '24)
Advisory Board of Institute of Botany CAS. Oliver is honoured to join the international advisory board of the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences. During the inaugural meeting, he and his IAB colleagues got to know the Průhonice Park, and learned a lot about the structure and current research of the institute. (April '24)
Diversity and natural variation of TEs in field pennycress. Dario and Oliver coauthor a new paper in PLoS Genetics that describes the diversity of transposable elements in the genome of Thlaspi arvense, based on a survey of 280 accessions from 12 geographic regions. A fabulous collaboration with the Weigelworld through our EU training network EpiDiverse! (Feb '24)
In the final round of the excellence competition! Wow, a total of six initatives for new Excellence Strategy research clusters with involvement of University of Tübingen have been allowed to submit full proposals, and two of these with involvement of our group! What a huge (intermediate) success! Now back to work... More details in the Uni Tübingen press release. (Feb '24)
At higher latitudes, knotweed invests more into belowground secondary metabolites in China. Finally, the first collaborative knotweed paper with our wonderful Chinese colleagues is out in the Journal of Ecology! We measured six polyphenols in shoots and rhizomes of knotweed along a 2000 latitudinal transect. This excellent work was led by PhD student Jingwen Bi. (Jan '24)
