Doctoral candidate honored for outstanding publication

To honor outstanding publications of doctoral candidates and postdocs, the Jena Alliance "Life in Focus" has awarded the Siegfried Czapski Publication Prize for young scientists for the first time. The prize, endowed with 2,000 EUR, recognizes an outstanding interdisciplinary publication in an internationally renowned journal that is located at the interface of the university's LIGHT and LIFE profile lines.

The Siegfried Czapski Publication Prize 2022 was awarded to doctoral candidate Mariana Murillo-Roos from the junior research group Plant Microbiosis. She receives the award for her publication in the open access journal "The ISME Journal - Cross-feeding niches among commensal leaf bacteria are shaped by the interaction of strain-level diversity and resource availability." The award was handed over on November 18 during the LIFE Symposium.

The publication of Ms. Murillo-Roos convinced the jury in particular by the use of a light-based analytical method in the context of a real-life problem. The work thus provides an exceptional interdisciplinary contribution at the interface of life sciences and photonics. Using fluorescent protein markers, Ms. Murillo-Roos has succeeded in labeling nearly identical strains of leaf bacteria differently and tracking their development using various microscopic methods. The use of a novel experimental design of different nutrient environments in combination with different bacterial strains provided completely new insights into the evolutionary processes of microorganisms and contributes significantly to the understanding of bacterial diversity.

The jury members of the Siegfried Czapski Publication Prize 2022 were: PD Dr. Silke Keiner (UKJ, Department of Neurology), Prof. Dr. Felix Schacher (Institute of Organic Chemistry and Macromolecular Chemistry IOMC) and Prof. Dr. Christian Franke (Institute of Applied Optics and Biophysics).