Welcome back Andrés
It is again this time of the year and Halloween is in sight, we are very happy to welcome Andrés Pérez González back to our group, after he was already ‘short-term’ member of our crew as a summer student in 2021. Andrés is a 4th year undergraduate student in our Biotechnology grade at the ETSIAAB and he will work on the functional characterisation of LAUCH2 (LAU2), a transcription factor that we recently identified as induced under drought conditions. Andrés will take a transcriptomics approach, and analyse differential gene expression patterns in both lau2 null mutants and conditional LAU2 overexpression lines. Preparatory work already highlighted the interaction of LAU2 with chromatin remodelling machinery components and suggested an involvement in the regulation of seed maturation. Along with the transcriptomics analysis of the LAU2 mutants, Andrés will conduct in vivo protein-protein interaction studies by performing bimolecular fluorescence complementation studies to confirm the physical interaction of LAU2 with a number of selected molecular targets by confocal laser scanning microscopy.