I am driving home for Christmas… I literally am, while writing these lines. In my case that means an approximate 12-hour train ride from Sweden to Germany. Not too bad, if everything goes according to plan (usually not the case). However, it makes me start thinking why I decided to live and work abroad in …
First author interview with Stijn Vanhee
I'm beyond proud of our recent paper in Science Immunology finally seeing the light. It was accepted almost exactly one year after our first rejection. Here is an interview with our first author Stijn Vanhee who was a postdoc in the lab from 2015 to 2019. Stijn has since moved on to the next chapter …
Celebrating team diversity
Hope you’ve had a good summer. This summer I completed the yearly staff evaluation process with my lab members where I meet with each person to go over their past performance and areas for future development. This meeting is formal in the sense that it is a responsibility delegated to me, the PI, by the …
Doing a PhD, from impossible to reality
When I started my undergraduate studies in biosciences back in 2011 at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, I never had the intention of doing a PhD. Honestly, I had no clue what a PhD student did, nor what it meant to work in science. Growing up in a small village in central Germany, science …
Distractions in disguise
At the beginning of the year I made a goal to submit 3 manuscripts from our lab in 2019. (Note that the goal reads submission rather than publication, the latter being something we have little control over.) Previously, we have never managed to submit more than one a year😱. My excuse was quality before quantity. …
Welcome Sneha!
We are excited to be joined by a new postdoctoral fellow, Dr Sneh Lata Gupta, a newly minted PhD from the National Institutes of Immunology (New Delhi, India). She goes by Sneha and is an expert in B cell immunology. Welcome to the Yuan lab and the DMH community Sneha!
What makes a good writer
Writing a paper represents the ultimate step of our work, the jewel on top of our scientific crown. We condense years of experiments, failures, hypothesis and models in a few-page-long manuscript and the impact of our research depends on how good we write it. Unfortunately, I will admit I’ve always been intimidated by writing. Whether …
News: Hugo wins best poster!
Congrats to Hugo Åkerstrand for winning the price for best poster at the EMBO B cell development and leukemia meeting in Salamanca, Spain! Well done Hugo!!!
Editing a manuscript
Stijn and I are in the process of editing a manuscript that has been a looong time in the making. We had submitted it for the first time last summer to a prestigious journal and, after extensive review, it was ultimately rejected. The four reviewers' comments were fair and, after briefly licking our wounds, we …
A PCR is like an apple pie
In our lab we always say: If you can bake a cake, you can do PCR😊. Just follow the instructions for the desired chemical reaction. Mix all the ingredients and put it into the oven/PCR machine. But don´t forget to add Taq polymerase/baking powder. Karin's latest PCR gel Back in the late eighties, or maybe …
The Yuan lab 