21st of June, 2025 

Briefly but with full intensity! Kristina and Anya … should be called Dear Drs. from now on 🥳 – whohoooo! Kristina will join Hanka Hanzlikova’s lab (IMG CAS, Prague) as her new post-doc towards the end of 2025 (the best of luck!), Anya will stay to be gently tortured further in our lab (the best of luck too!) – whohoooo! New PhD student, Radu Centnerová, from Moravia will join the lab very soon, working closely with Anička – whohoooo! New Diploma student of Adri CZ, Bc. Mykhailo Streltsov from Ukraine, will join the lab very soon too – whohoooo! Peta and Zuzka are expecting babies – whohoooo! (I mean, not together! 😵‍💫) Klarka got married a week ago – whohoooo! Adri SK is no longer Leoš's PhD student, but newly Adri’s CZ - whohoooo! (I mean, what a shame! 🙃) Leoš has become a new member of the Academia Europaea association – whohoooo! (I mean, guys, who the … cares, right?!🤠) Leoš & comp advanced to the 3rd round of the ERC Synergy grant competition - whohoooo! (I mean, we ALL very MUCH care!!! 🫶 ) Filip CZ will soon be on his way to Trumpland to nail our future Nature paper down in Jodi Puglisi’s lab in Stanford – whohoooo! (I mean, the best of luck with everything in this current EverWonderLand!🤯) Pasha decided to leave us for India but recently changed his mind and will stay – whohoooo! (I mean, such a restless mind for his age ☺️.) NKOTB have gained a lot of skills and are now working with full force ✌️ – whohoooo! (I mean, it's sheer joy to see them growing into independent researchers!) Many thanks to Filip SK for taking care of our web 🙏 - whohoooo! Summer holidays are here - whohoooo 🌞! Howgh - whohoooo 🤪!

 

1st of April, 2025 

This past wknd we went on a long-planned and once or twice postponed winter teambuilding adventure. Yes, it is spring already, but who cares. True, it would have been fun to see our “tropical” colleagues learning to ski (that was THE original idea), nonetheless, instead of snow&ice, we saw the awakening of nature – the white-flowering valley of the Zdobnice river, frogs laying zillion of eggs, singing birds inviting their partners to a dance of love, joyfully swimming fish (did not see any but they definitely must have been there!), people getting their gardens ready for a later harvest, slowly opening village pubs with rotten drinks from the last year (no kidding!), etc. … some of us even indulged in an invigorating/rejuvenating morning bath in the same river ... check out the photos. 

Other than that, Kristína and Anya are getting ready to defend their desire to become PhDs, Adriana Jr. is getting ready to take the PhD state exam off her shoulders, and Terka’s followers and I are getting ready to write a big big paper :o) In the meantime, our collaborative papers in Nature, NSMB and mBio have been published (see below) and a Standard Czech Science Foundation grant has been - after an enforced last minute remake - submitted with low energy (endlessly) but high hopes (obviously)! What else? The world has gone completely mad, but we R staying sane!!! For as long as we can… 

 

 

13th of January, 2025

Happy New Year to everyone – Peace on Earth above all! ☮️ We started 2025 with … indeed, grant reports, but also with this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-024-01450-z ... awaited for a looooong time!🤝 Now, a short-lived joy and let’s move on! Soon another NSMB will be out (it is a real struggle to deal with their editorial office, constantly understaffed, it is No-Go for us for any future submissions to this journal 🙈), a Nature paper describing a new branch of the Integrated Stress Response pathway, to which Leos contributed to, will be most probably ‘accepted in principle’ any day now … cool 😃! Another collaborative paper with Jula Lukes and Zdenek Paris has just been submitted to PNAS, and another one with Marek Elias will be submitted to (most likely) NAR soon. With Christine Vogel, we are working on revisions of our start-stop (AUG-stop elements in the 5’ UTRs of mRNAs) paper for NAR, and a couple of other stories from our lab are shaping up into individual stories to be written up this year 💪. All in all, let’s wish that this year is a smooth ride through our research, as well as personal lives 🤘. I am very happy for sharing my life with you, guys! Thank you. 🙏 Leos

 

22st of November, 2024

Guess what? Zuzka’s and Petra’s Nature Structure & Molecular Biology paper has been accepted in principle after 17 super long months.🥳 Unbelievable! I mean, unbelievable that it took the editor over a year to just administer our manuscript. Everything was held up by one very negative reviewer, anonymous of course, some of whose comments were - based on cross-review by other reviewers - ridiculous and for whatever reason hostile, and who essentially took the position of the editor, with the real editor playing only the role of secretary... I consider this to be a major failure of the editor's job! 🙈 

Never mind, if this negative reviewer ever reads these lines, I encourage them to contact me, so that we can talk about anything they didn’t like. I’ll try to explain it to “you” and will listen to your thoughts, because “constructive criticism with a face” is much easier to deal with than "mean criticism" from someone steadfastly hiding in the darkness of anonymity. But all is well that ends well. After filing a complaint with the Editor-in-Chief of the entire Nature group, we got a new editor, who finally accepted it and apologized deeply for all the time lost. Chief Editor of NSMB also apologized profusely, and told us that she really liked our work very much, so she will highlight it with a News & Views commentary. 🤠 

All in all, big congratulations girls, to Zuzka for her fantastic work at the beginning and to Petra for her fantastic work at the end. The middle was in common! 😎🤙 

In addition to that, one more collaborative NSMB paper where Leos is a co-corresponding author was accepted in principle on the same day (led by Pasha Baranov and Gary Loughran)! 😇 A Communication Biology collaborative paper with a Japanese group of Takeshi Chujo was also published this month, and finally Anya’s Star Protocols paper was published just yesterday 🥳. So at the beginning of this month our thoughts were as dark as the sky over Prague🌧️, but now they are as full of sunshine as the sky over Prague. 🌞

 

1st of Oct, 2024

TITLE: A proloooonged weekend in the heart of western Šumava opened our hearts once and for all. 

ABSTRACT: People enjoy having fun. However, people have to go to work (almost) every day to work very hard, so that there is practically no time for socializing. What to do then? To fill this critical knowledge gap and examine the effect of being together day & night as a team for almost 3 days, we took advantage of our private road devices (so-called cars) and went to the western Šumava region near Kdyně - Penzion Pranty. We tested hiking, magic mushroom (Bedlas Jedlas) picking & frying, meat & vegan grilling, Indian cooking, overeating & overdrinking, singing, playing volleyball, ping-pong, billiard, swimming :) … simply explored how to have fun as a team. All activities scored positive on our pleasure scale with p < 0.000001. Truly, it was fun 😎. In detail, on Friday we peaked on Paradise and got drunk, on Saturday we hiked the highest peak of this region - Čerchov (a super steep and long and exhausting hike 🤪) and got drunk, and on Sunday we almost went horseback riding - instead we ended up in the pilgrimage church of St. Anna on Tanaberk and prayed. The whole weekend experience had a very sunny impact on our souls, not so sunny on our stomachs & heads, but that was overridden by colorful and tasty headache pills. And the fabulous Sunday weather too. 

Concluding remarks: The take home message of this common experiment is very straightforward: let’s do it again soon! 

Funding: Endless Universe 🙏.

Acknowledgments: To all who joined, as well as to all that did not (Endless Universe could save some money 🥳). 

References: booking.com, mapy.cz, whatsApp and instagram (at least for some of us 😉)

 

2nd of Sept, 2024 

Kids are back at school, hhuurraayy! 😁 Petra is about to take her state exam and defend her diploma work and Srinjoyee has finally joined the NKOTB club. This means that we R complete & ready to roll! 🤙Our team-building weekend in the Sumava mountain is drawing near! 🥳 What else? It is hot hot hot!!! 😅 

 

22th of July, 2024

Kristina’s Tma manu has just been accepted in Communication Biology from the Nature Portfolio publishing group! 🤯🥳 Big congrats and many thanks for your practically independent work 👍👍! With this accomplishment, Kristina's path to her PhD degree is clear and leads in only one direction ... to nail it down soon 💪Fingers crossed! 🤙

 

15th of July, 2024

Guess what? Nawal, our new PhD student from Lebanon, has joined the lab (and brought us an excellent assortment of baklava and cones of mystical Cedrus libani with a very pleasant scent) and Leos was elected to the EMBO Membership. Most importantly, Terka is organizing a summer barbecue at the end of July before leaving us for her eagerly awaited maternity duties 😁

 

16th of June, 2024

 We Are the Champions, my Friends! First of all, Peta, Nawal, Srinjoyee and Pragya have successfully passed their PhD admission exams! Hold on to your hats, ladies, the PhD roller coaster is about to get underway. The best of luck! 

Then Dr. Zuzka and Dr. Terka super-successfully defended their PhD theses … biiiig congratulations, dear doctors, and a million thanks for your hard, wonderful work!!! 

And finally, Adri and I finished our first lecture series with the exam of our first students. Our summer semester lecture is called: “Everything you wanted to know about gene expression but were afraid to ask.” The students reportedly enjoyed it a lot, so dear future students, do not hesitate to sign up for it in 2024/5 😊 

Other than that, Zuzka’s NSMB is still … under second re-review … amazing how long it’s taking there…, and Kristina’s revised Comm Biol has just been submitted. Fingers crossed and everyone, hey, enjoy the summer! 🌞

 

5th of June, 2024

 

2nd of May, 2024 

 

Btw, we have unofficially learned that our lab has unofficially won the GAČR (Czech Science Foundation) President’s Award 2023 for the best research project in the field of Medical and Biological Sciences. However, since we won it also in 2020 and according to the rules, it cannot be awarded twice to the same lab, the award will go to the next in line and not to us.🤯 Nevertheless, an official letter was sent to us congratulating us on our great achievements, which is very nice and we appreciate it very much.🤙 And last but not least, “summer” is in full force again!🌞 

 

14th of Apr, 2024 

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome “New Kids on the Block”! In other words, our three new PhD students: Nawal from Lebanon, and Srinjoyee and Pragya from India, who will be joining us in person SOON! We wish them a smooth and enjoyable start to their PhD endeavours. 🙂

Other than that, we had ~two weeks of really hot summer in early April, now we are back to winter – it snowed today. Amazing! Really! What comes next? Better not to ask, I guess... 

 

7th of Mar, 2024 

2nd of Feb, 2024 

This ending week marks a visit of our colleagues and friends, Lynne-Maria Postovit from Queen’s University of Ontario and Ivan Topisirovic from McGill, Montreal. They spent 4 days with us, both gave talks at our institute, discussed our projects with everyone, enjoyed Czech meals and beers, a bit of sightseeing and bought a Bohemias 1905 football jersey for Lynne’s son (in fact that’s why they came :)) It was fun! “Thank you both for your openness and common sense attitude in every aspect of life”. It is very rare these days! 

 

24th of Jan, 2024

Guess what? The new lab web – including our new logo! - is up and running. It still requires a bit of fine-tuning, but the hard work is done! Many thanks to everybody, especially to Filip (the 1 st ) and Terka and her husband Alex! Other than that, Anicka’s eLife is in, Zuzka’s NSMB and Anya’s Cell Rep under re-revision, Kristina’s RNA submission being finalized, 5 more collaborative papers at various stages of the process ... looks like 2024 is going to be a Good Year, Continentally, woo-hoo! We will soon be welcoming our new post-doc, Filip (the 2 nd ) Trcka, and will soon open a new PhD position for the 2024/25 academic year. And finally, the real thrill! British The Vaccines are performing at the Roxy tonight! Cannot wait! C U there 😉 

 

10th of Dec, 2023

We are happy to announce that we have just hit the road with this brand new website – still a bit under construction but we R getting there! It has been a collaborative creative effort with everyone contributing his/her artistic bit to the mill. Filip, our new post-doc from Slovakia, then put it altogether in this 0 and 1 format. Hope you like it as much as we do (at least some of us :)). Other than that, after clinching our first Nature earlier this year, we have 5 more papers in the pipeline, with Zuzka’s NSMB, which is awaiting our resubmission, likely to cross the finish line first. We also have a new PhD student Adriana Šubrtová from Slovakia, who has joined Adriana Sr. on her T-cell project to create a fail-safe “Adrianas duet” that warrants its 100% success. When both Filip and Adriana Jr. travel home, they always bring back something very tasteful from their country’s finest delicacies! We want more people from countries like this! Finally, this year we’ve also won decent funding for the next five years … OP JAK, a CSF-DFG collaborative grant and a standard CSF grant. So, we are all set to perform our finest tunes. Btw, we got over 30 cm of new snow today. Marvelous, skiing is nearing!!!