Congratulations Hassan, very well deserved!

Thanks a lot Ula, it was a really enjoyable visit!

Thank you to everyone involved in the project. Emma Kane provided outstanding leadership and supervision in the project, but we would like in particular to thank the @unituebingen.bsky.social students Lena Eckert and Lio Trefs for their amazing work!

We find that the proteins of the Ectocarpus axis have many features shared with other organisms, but in a unique combination. We speculate that the arrangement may allow brown algae to regulate recombination by diverse mechanisms of recruiting more or less ecHOP1 to chromosomes

Thanks to all the people involved in the project, in particular to the outstanding @unituebingen.bsky.social students Lena Eckert and Lio Trefs!

#AlphaFold2 found that ecRED1 had *six* candidate closure motifs. Careful biochemical analysis could only prove the veracity of one of these, but with the door open for the other motifs to be activated by post-translational modifications

We found that ecHOP1 has two splice variants. One, which contains two "closure motifs"- sequences that bind to other ecHOP1 proteins - and one isoform with none

Previous work from @eelcotromer.bsky.social and @bungoakiyoshi.bsky.social had identified potential candidates for two factors that assemble on meiotic chromosomes to form the "axis". We found that both of these proteins, ecHOP1 and ecRED1 are specifically expressed in meiotic tissue