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SPACA6 paper published in Frontiers

03 Jan 2022

What a wonderful start into the New Year with having our Spaca6 paper published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology!

The story behind this paper has been one of the highlights of the past year: Under the fantastic mentoring of Victoria, two highly motivated and gifted students, Mirjam Binner and Anna Kogan, who joined our lab to gain lab-experience during the time of Corona, took the lead not only on the experimental side but also in writing the paper. Despite Mirjam and Anna having both moved on to new positions in spring 2021, their dedication and excitement, together with regular zoom calls between Vienna, Finland and Russia over the past 9 months and additional help from Karin and Alex Schleiffer made it possible to have our story about the requirement of Spaca6 for fertilization in zebrafish ‘in the books’!

Big congratulations to all authors, in particular to Mirjam, Anna and Victoria for carrying this project through from A to Z and making it happen!

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Happy New Year

31 Dec 2021

Happy New Year from all of us in the Pauli lab! Despite the pandemic not allowing us to interact with other researchers around the world as much as we would have liked and limiting our celebrations and social activities, it’s been an exciting, fun and successful 2021.

We are curious what 2022 will bring along!

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SPACA4 paper published in PNAS

24 Sep 2021

It’s been a while in the making, and it’s great to see it finally out in PNAS! In collaboration with Yoshitaka Fujihara and Masahito Ikawa’s lab, we discovered an interesting evolutionary twist in vertebrate fertilization: While we previously identified egg-expressed Bouncer in fish as essential for sperm-egg membrane interaction (Herberg et al., 2018), we report here that its mammalian homolog SPACA4 is expressed in sperm and necessary for zona pellucida penetration. Hence, Bouncer and SPACA4 present a fascinating example of homologous proteins that have evolved different mode of actions to ensure efficient fertilization in vertebrates. Congratulations to all authors, in particular Sarah who started the project, and Andreas and Karin from the Pauli lab as well as Yoshi from the Ikawa lab who took it over and finalized the research!

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