.Viviane Cordovez had the opportunity to show our work on #phyllosphere #yeast at the #PlantMicrobeInteractions2022 conference Novo Nordisk Foundation Science Cluster. They even have someone (Eleonora Nigro) live-drawing the presentations, how cool is that!

Update 1 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: While we were having a great time at the #PMI2022 conference, some birds had a big party with our seedlings. Birds ✅ 1 | 0 🆘 wheat seedlings. New seeds will be sown this week, hopefully not too late yet..

Besides the great opportunity Viviane Cordovez got last week to present our data at the #PMI2022 conference, we were also awarded with the poster prize! Below a picture of the authors while celebrating 🍷 Curious about its content? Check out our paper: frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

Update 2 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: After the birds had a big party with our seedlings and seeds, we have now covered the new seeds with nets. Lets hope that they won't find a way to get into the tunnel and have a festive Christmas dinner... 🌱🕊️

Update 3 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: We considered ourselves, and our seedlings, safe for less than 3 days. Today we found out that we are probably fighting something else than birds: 🐭 This hungry friend did not survive its encounter with the NIOO cat. Any tips?

Update 4 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: Against all expectations, beautiful rows of wheat seedlings are now popping up in our pots! Guess it wasn't too late for a belated Christmas present 🎁 Now lets hope that winter isn't too harsh on these tiny survivors

Great that we could finally have a biannual MATRIX meeting "offline" ! The picture below is what happens when there is no profesionnal photographer involved

Update 5 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: Our wheat plants have been growing like crazy since the past few weeks, so today it was time for the first harvest! These samples will be used to track our interesting yeast within the plant and throughout the following weeks.

Update 6 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: It was finally time to free our wheat plants! 🌱 Grains have emerged and are slowly starting to flower. Today, the pots were moved to the tunnel where they will be inoculated with yeast to (hopefully) protect against FHB.

Update 7 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: Today, more than 1200 grains have been inoculated with yeasts or water🧑🏼‍🔬. After 48 hours, we will introduce the pathogen. Lets hope these tiny fighters do our wheat plants (and myself..) a favor and protect against FHB. 💪🏼

Update 8 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: Another 1200 grains have been inoculated today. However, this time with the pathogen. 💀 Lets hope we can see some differences in our treatments next week! 🌱 In the meantime, we'll harvest every 2-3 days to follow the disease.

Today, I got to present our work on phyllosphere yeasts at the annual CCRP meeting, representing the work Viviane Cordovez and I do at NIOO for the MATRIX 🧫 Ofcourse part of the story was about the cool pot experiment in the experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology 🌱

Update 9 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: Excited to see some first hints of Fusarium infection!🧟 Big shout out to our students who took care of the harvest while we were in Denmark and who've made beautiful pictures 🌱 Curious for next week to see more FHB symptoms 💀

Update 10 from our experimental garden NL Inst of Ecology: D-day for our Fusarium-experiment! Today we harvest all left-over grains and scored FHB incidence💀. Besides visual scoring, we will also perform RT-qPCR for quantification. However, that first means lots of RNA extractions..

Happy to be able to present our newest data on the potential of yeast to control mycotoxin contamination, at the Plant Microbiome conference in Quito. Together with Viviane Cordovez for the MATRIX at NL Inst of Ecology.

Very honored to receive the poster prize at the Plant Microbiome symposium in Quito, including a year subscription to Nature Microbiology 👩🏼‍🔬. But, maybe even more honored to call these amazing scientists (Viviane Cordovez, Gilles van Wezel 💙💛 & Jos) my (previous) supervisors 🙌🏼.

Del 1 al 4 de agosto se desarrolló el 4th Plant Microbiome Symposium, el cual reunió a investigadores, profesionales y expertos de diversas latitudes para presentar investigaciones de vanguardia en este campo científico.

All heading towards the same point! Increasing wheat resilience 🫸🏼🫷🏼

Big step for the Cordovez lab! The first of many more to come 👩‍🔬

Time to inoculate, again. 🌾🧫 We started another big screening to validate the bio control potential of our yeasts in planta. Around 1.000 ears were manually inoculated, which wouldn't have been possible without the help of our students. Results will be in after Christmas so🤞🏼