Congratulations Konrad!
Thursday 12 December DynaMo PhD scholar Konrad Weber defended his PhD thesis and was awarded the PhD degree.
In front of colleagues, family and friends Konrad Weber succesfully defended his PhD thesis. The aim of Konrads’s PhD project was to focus on specific genetic region in the Arabidopsis thaliana genome coding for enzymes responsible for the modification of the defense compound glucosinolates; his thesis is entitled ‘Evolution in regulatory networks coordinating development and defense chemistry’.
The AOP locus harbors two enzyme-coding genes, AOP2 and AOP3, known to shape the glucosinolate profile. Glucosinolates display great variability across populations, and this variation is substantially dependent on the allelic status of the AOP locus. In this project, Konrad investigated whether additional functional units, in the form of long-non-coding RNAs (lnc RNAs) that also originate from this locus, or the genetic region itself underwent recurrent structural diversification to obtain phenotypic diversity.
Konrad holds a BSc and MSc in Science from the Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany. In January 2016, he joined DynaMo Center as a PhD student. His PhD supervisor was Associate Professor Meike Burow.