Takaki Maekawa
maekawa@mpipz.mpg.de
Principal Investigator
Zülpicher Straße 47b 50674 Köln
Phone: +49 (0)221 4708 9090
Takaki is a group leader at the Institute for Plant Sciences. Before joining the Institute, he was a team leader at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, where he led a group studying disease resistance mechanisms mediated by plant NLRs using barley (Hordeum vulgare) and Arabidopsis thaliana as experimental models. He is interested in how plant and animal innate immune systems have evolved and how these systems mechanistically execute disease resistance programmes.
Keiichi Hasegawa
khasegawa@mpipz.mpg.de
PhD Student
Keiich started in the Maekawa lab in 2020 as a joint PhD student shared with the laboratory of Jijie Chai. He is studying the mechanisms of how plant and animal MLKLs mediate cell death and immunity using biochemical and structural biology approaches.
Qiaochu Shen
PhD Student
Qiaochu started her PhD in 2020. She is studying the molecular mechanisms of how plant MLKL mediates cell death and immunity using super-resolution imaging technologies.
Anna Prakken
Bachelor student
Anna studies spatial patterns of Ca2+ signalling during cell death and immunity using a geneticaly encoded Ca2+ sensor.
Ronja Kunz
Master student
Ronja studies roles of phospholipids in the subcellular localisation of plant MLKL proteins. Ronja utilises phospholipid biosensor and membrane-tethering lipases that deplete phospholipids in a lipid species specific manner.
Dennis Mahr
Technical assistant
Lea Weiler-Tersch
Technical assistant
Farnaz Faezi
Visting scientist from Shiraz university
Farnaz studies the disease resistance function of RGH1 immune receptors of wild barley against fungal pathogens. Farnaz’s project involves isolation the Puccinia species endemic in Iranian field.
Elke Henn
Administrative support