Latest news

Caroline Marcon and Frank Hochholdinger received the cooperator award of the Maize Genetics Cooperation¹

Frank Hochholdinger, professor for Crop Functional Genomics at the INRES and Carolin Marcon, project leader of the BonnMu group, were honored with the 2025 Maize Genetics Cooperator Award by the Maize Genetics Cooperation at the 67th maize genetics conference in St. Louis, USA.

Field trail in Madagascar²

After all the preparations had been made, our group from INRES - Crop Functional Genomics consisting of Dr. Zhihui Wen, Dr. Xiaoming He, Ben Wilhelm Braun and Alena Albrecht left Bonn for Madagascar in February. At the airport in Frankfurt we met two colleagues from the IPK in Gatersleben, Dr. Ivan Lopez-Valdivia and Dr. Matias Schierenbeck and together we started our journey to Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar.

DMK and DBG awards for Cay Schäfer³

Cay Schäfer was awarded the DMK (Deutsches Maiskomitee) Prize for Young Scientists 2024 for her master's thesis “Crosstalk between the micronutrient boron and the phytohormone auxin on the level of polar auxin transport during primary root development of maize (Zea mays)”. In addition, her master thesis was selected as best master thesis in Plant Sciences at the University of Bonn in 2024 by the DBG (Deutsche Botanische Gesellschaft). The master thesis was done in the Department Crop Functional Genomics in the project group Boron Deficiency (Dr. Michaela Matthes).

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Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Bonn adopts new name⁴

What has been known up until now as the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Bonn is being renamed the Faculty of Agricultural, Nutritional, and Engineering Sciences with immediate effect. The faculty is taking this step in order to better reflect the specialist fields that it covers by giving equal weight to the nutritional and engineering sciences alongside the agricultural sciences.

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Congratulations to Emmy Noether group leader Peng Yu for his appointment as professor at TU Munich⁵

In October 2024, Peng Yu was appointed professor for Plant Genetics at the TU Munich School of Life Sciences.

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DGP conference in Bonn⁶

From Sep 2nd to Sep 4th the annual conference of the German Society for Plant Nutrition (DGP) was held in the beautiful Poppelsdorf Castle. The conference was locally hosted and organized by the INRES -Plant Nutrition.

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Melanie Braun receives ERC Grant⁷

There have never been so many ERC Starting Grants at once at the University of Bonn: no fewer than seven researchers have been successful with their applications in the highly competitive European Research Council (ERC) funding process. With their funding of some €1.5 million each, the researchers from the fields of ethics, mathematics, economics, soil science, computer science and astronomy will be able to realize their projects over the next five years.

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Farmland weeds help to combat pests⁸

Leaving some weeds between crops can help to combat pests on agricultural land, according to a new study carried out by the University of Bonn. This step has particularly positive effects in combination with other measures: the cultivation of different types of crops and planting strips of wildflowers. The results have now been published in the Journal of Pest Science.

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