Andreas defends his PhD
27 Jan 2025
Immensely proud of Andreas for defending his PhD with flying colors - big congratulations Dr. Blaha for a brilliant PhD defense on the ‘Mechanistic Analysis of Sperm-Egg Interaction in Vertebrates’!
While Andreas’s main aim of his PhD never changed, namely to identify the mysterious sperm receptor of Bouncer, Solving other interesting ‘problems’ on the way (the function of the mammalian Bouncer homolog SPACA4 in mouse fertilization, the function of the deeply conserved fertility factors Dcst1/2 in fish, sperm-egg compatibility in zebrafish and medaka), Andreas finally discovered the mysterious sperm receptor of Bouncer. While this had been his main aim of his PhD all along, he reached it in a completely different manner. Teaming up with Victoria and embracing AlphaFold structural prediction tools, Andreas found that the egg protein Bouncer binds to a conserved trimeric complex on sperm, thereby bridging sperm and egg membranes in fish. This conserved sperm complex uses different egg proteins as interaction partners in vertebrates, highlighting a fascinating playground of evolution.
Thank you for all your contributions to our lab - you will be greatly missed, not only because of your insightful questions in lab meetings! We wish you all the best for your future postdoc, whereever it will take you!
A big thank you also to Andreas’s examiners Ori Avinoam (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel), Bill Snell (University of Maryland, USA) and Uli Technau (University of Vienna, Austria) for the stimulating discussion.
