Students coming and going
In April Damien Avinens, a master student from the University of Montpellier, France, joined our lab. For his Erasmus project he will investigate Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) and how it interacts with native supported lipid bilayers (nSLBs). He is interested in understanding whether a human protein, apolipoprotein E, modifies the interaction kinetics of the virus with the cell membrane. He will be mainly supervised by Konrad but also get help from Lifeng, our HSV expert, who is very interested in the data for his own project.
Damien arrived in time to have 2 weeks of overlap with our other Erasmus student Julius von Wiren who came from the University of Göttingen. Julius’s project also used nSLBs to study virus-membrane interactions. Thus, Damien could follow Julius for a few days in the lab and learn from him some of the methods that he will need for his own project. Julius did an excellent job at studying the interaction kinetics between lipid vesicles that were decorated with spike proteins from different coronaviruses and nSLBs. Dario, who was Julius´s main supervisors, is already missing his student; unfortunately Julius had to go back to Germany to finish his master studies.
