Leonie Hacker: The Plant Cell First Author

Leonie Hacker, first author of “The repair of topoisomerase 2 cleavage complexes in Arabidopsis”

Current position: PhD student, Botanical Institute, Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

Education: B.S. and M.S. in Biology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

Non-scientific interests: Contemporary dancing, traveling, spending time with my friends

Brief Bio: During my bachelor’s and master’s thesis, I worked in Prof. Natalia Requenas group and studied the interaction between plants and mycorrhizal fungi. This was a very interesting topic where I learned a lot about the plant immune system and the world of effector proteins. For my PhD I joined Prof. Holger Puchtas group and became interested in the wide variety of DNA repair pathways in Arabidopsis, with a particular focus on the repair of DNA-protein crosslinks (DPC). Using CRISPR/Cas mediated mutagenesis I generated mutations in the DNA repair factor TDP2 and analysed the subsequent mutant lines in a reverse genetic approach. Doing this, I was able to define new DPC-repair pathways in Arabidopsis. Now I’m at the end of my PhD and I’m excited about what the next stage of my life will bring.