Congratulations, Dr. Karelina & Dr. Van de Weyer!

A first: Two PhD defenses on one day!

Both Anna-Lena and Darya investigated the amazing diversity of NLR genes in Arabidopsis thaliana:

Anan-Lena’s PhD thesis is entitled “The pan-NLR’ome of Arabidopsis thalianaGenome-Wide Analysis of Nucleotide-Binding Domain Leucine-Rich Repeat (NLR) Variation Patterns in Arabidopsis thaliana.” Anna-Lena used NLR sequence enrichment combined with PacBio long reads to reconstruct the NLR complement in 65 accessions.

Darya’s PhD thesis is entitled “Genome-Wide Analysis of Nucleotide-Binding Domain Leucine-Rich Repeat (NLR) Variation Patterns in Arabidopsis thaliana“. Darya used short reads from the 1001 Genomes Project as well as short reads from A. lyrata and C. rubella accessions to examine within- and between- species conservation of NLR genes.