News
3/1/2025
We welcome new PhD student Monika Mikušková. Her goal is to find and characterize new terpene synthases from various lineages of insects. Monika is one of two PhD students whose studies are funded by the European project ModBioTerp from the Horizon MSCA Doctoral network programme. Good luck, Monika!
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20/9/2024
Congratulations to Marie Pangrácová for successful defence of her PhD thesis on longevity in kings and queens of termites. Well done, Mája!
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1/8/2024
We are happy to announce that we received support from the INTER-COST programme for the next three years of our research on terpenoid biosynthesis in insects.
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26/7/2024
Thanks to an admirable effort of our colleagues from OIST (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology) the classification of termites has been thoroughly revised using ultraconserved genomic elements and massive sampling of termites across continents. The resulting paper corrects many long-known taxonomic errors and inconsistencies, and provides a new perspective on termite evolution. Thank you, Simon and Thomas, for this great work and for having invited the termite research community to join you in this adventure. Now it's just a matter of learning all the names of newly established families and subfamilies 😊.
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1/7/2024
We are honored to co-organize (on behalf of IOCB) the 39th annual meeting of ISCE (International Society of Chemical Ecology), which takes place in Prague (14-18/7), and to welcome more than 300 participants from all over the world. We are looking forward to meeting old colleagues and new faces, and especially to a lot of chemical ecology in the form of more than two hundred lectures and one hundred posters. The good news for the future of chemical ecology is that 30% of active conference attendees are students.
Find more here: www.isce2024.cz
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10/2/2024
Everything you need to know about the termite queen can be found here:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cois.2023.101157
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1/7/2023
We are happy to become the official partner of the European project from the EIC Pathfinder programme. Under the acronym SMELLODI the project aims at understanding the chemistry of human body odor with potential practical applications in disease diagnostics or as a tool to improve the life of people with olfactory disorders.
Our goal within the project is to use our modern GCxGC-TOFMS instrument for chemical analyses of human body odor.
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28/4/2023
We are glad to see our investigations on the evolution of linoleic acid biosynthesis in termites just published in Molecular Biology and Evolution.
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20/9/2023
We welcome to our group a new PhD student Anna Amirianová. We hope she will enjoy the work on insect terpene synthases.
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2/11/2022
After more than ten years of investigations here in Prague and in South-American forests, we are glad to announce that we start to understand the complex interplay between genetic and chemical factors controlling the formation of queens in parthenogenetic higher termites.
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21/4/2021
Congratulations to Mája for her first PhD paper on the longevity of termite kings and queens, just published in PRSB.
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11/2/2021
Congratulations to Radka for the 1st prize in the national competition Karel Stulik Award 2021 for the best student work in the field of analytical chemistry awarded by the Czech Chemical Society!
