People

About Helene Robert Boisivon, Ph.D.

Since 2017, I am the group leader of the “Hormonal crosstalk in Plant Development” research team, in the Mendel Centre for Plant Genomics and Proteomics, headed by Prof. Jiří Fajkus, at CEITEC Masaryk University, in Brno, Czech Republic.

I studied biology in my hometown at the University of Rouen and did my Master studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. My practical training marked the starting of a long relationship with seed development at Laboratory of Reproduction and Development of Plants, under the supervision of Dr. Fred Berger, now at the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna, Austria. For more information check this page.

About Marek Sedláček

I graduated in Food Safety and Quality at University of Veterinary and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Brno, Czech Republic. After my graduation I moved to England to develope my skills, gain new job opportunity and experiences, so I started to work as laboratory technician with quality assurance testing and development work in support of Alcohol and co - product manufacturing. Achieved a skillset in experimental equipment and procedures I got new position as a laboratory analyst - I worked with HPLC to separate a mixture of compounds by performing different test, extraction and analyzed vitamins in food and pharmaceutical drugs, e.g. I came back to Czech Republic and I have joined to this group in 2020. My main duties include helping people in a group, make sure that everyday in laboratory runs smoothly and my co-workers have everything they need. The most important thing is being helpful at anytime when my co- workers need it and more.For more information check this page. 

About Marie Štefková

After my Master's studies in Molecular Biology and Genetics here at Masaryk University, I enrolled for an internship at the University of Crete (Greece), where I studied RNA silencing mechanisms in tobacco plants. After my return, I joined this group in 2018 as a laboratory technician. My daily purpose now is to help the other group members by growing plants such as Arabidopsis, rapeseed and tomato, helping to plan their qPCR experiments, preparing various media and also competent cells for cloning experiments. In the meantime, I am administering our laboratory database. I am also quite enthusiastic about photography, so if anybody needs help regarding photos, here is the right place. For more information check this page.

About Lenka Švihlová

I joined the group in 2016 after my master's studies in Molecular Biology and Genetics. Armed with precise pipettes, sharp tweezers, and steady hands, I support other group members in their research, especially with solutions and samples preparation, plants growing and crossing, embryo rescue, and genotyping. For more information, check this page.

About Samia Belaidi

I graduated as an agronomic engineer specialized in Plant Production Science from the National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia in 2018. Then, I got my Master of Science in Horticultural Genetics and Biotechnology from the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania, Greece in 2020. My master’s thesis was about elucidating the effect of SLP4H3 alteration on the expression of key regulatory genes involved in tomato fruit ethylene biosynthesis and abscission zone formation. In 2022, I joined the team of Hormonal crosstalk in Plant Development as a Ph.D. student to work on the project aiming to unravel the role of the Auxin Response Factor 5 and MicroRNAs in the embryogenic transition in Arabidopsis thaliana. For more information, check this page.

About Shekoufeh Ebrahimi Naghani

I have completed a master in Biotechnology in Agriculture at Shahrekord University, Shahrekord, Iran, in 2015. My master project focused on using molecular markers to find the variation between different Almond varieties and the effect of slope and elevation on making a variation on these lines.  I have joined the group in 2018 as a Ph.D. student and my research revolve mostly around finding the functional genes for thermogenesis in Arabidopsis thaliana. For more information, check this page.

About Kateřina Mácová

Whole my academic life is connected to Masaryk University. After master studies of Molecular Biology and Genetics, I started the work on my doctoral project elucidating the response of Brassica napus plants to long term high temperature stress. I aim to describe how changes in plant hormones' levels helps to these plants deal with high temperatures. Moreover, I am trying to use x-ray microtomography to visualise internal seed structures including embryos. For more information check this page

About Souad Mroue

I joined the group at its start in 2014 as PhD student, after a Master of Science in Horticultural Genetics and Biotechnology from MAICh in Chania, Greece. My work focuses on the analysis of the lec1-2 mutant and the link between LEC1 and auxin biosynthesis in pistils and seeds of Arabidopsis. 

About Unnikannan Prabhullachandran

I had completed my Post-Graduate degree in Biological Sciences from IISER Thiruvananthapuram, India. Back there I was studying the role of some of the gametophytic lethal genes, involved in the PRC2 complex, in the development of Arabidopsis thaliana using the technique of haploid induction under Dr Ravi Maruthachalam. Currently, I am doing my Doctoral research in finding out the gene regulatory mechanisms involved in the process of thermoregulation in the development of the Brassica napus seeds under heat stress. For more information check this page. 

About Juan Francisco Sanchez Lopez

I am a PhD student from this group since 2018. I come from one of the hottest places in Spain, the Region of Murcia, where I studied both my Bachelor and Master´s degrees. In there, I researched about the bioproduction of different plant secondary metabolites using different nanoparticles. Here, in Brno, I am focusing on elucidating how plants adapt to high-temperature environments, focusing in embryo development. Apart from my life in the lab, I spend a lot of time baking cakes, bread and cookies, since I am the author of a cooking blog (you can guess who brings the cakes to the lab meetings). Also, I am growing a jungle of carnivorous plants at home, but they never get to try my cakes. For more information check this page. 

About Veronika Jedličková, Ph.D.

My alma mater is the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice (Czech republic) where I studied the programme of Molecular and Cell Biology and Genetics. During my studies and postdoctoral research I have worked with various organisms such as Drosophila, pea aphid, oil-seed rape or the insect viruses. I have researched in the areas of diverse molecular techniques including cell proliferation and apoptosis assays, RNA interference and gene reporter assays, and I have studied plant mobile elements using both molecular biology tools and bioinformatic analyses. I am currently focusing on the plant tissue culture, primarily on hairy roots derived from the infection of a plant by Agrobacterium rhizogenes, and on gene expression analyses. For more information check this page.

About Subodh Verma, Ph.D.

I completed my doctoral work in Sabhyata Bhatia`s lab at NIPGR, New Delhi, India, where I used integrated approaches to study chickpea seed development. Now as a postdoc, I am investigating the transcriptional regulation of auxin biosynthetic genes during embryo development in Arabidopsis, and how this mechanism is affected by high temperatures. For more information check this page.