Housewarming festivities celebrate Microverse interim building and new research directions

A tall man in a red sweater and a short woman with brown hair stand on either side of large artwork that playfully depicts yellow bacteria, green fungi, magenta virus particles, orange DNA and a blue amino acid chain. The crowd claps.

The Balance of the Microverse community celebrated the opening of the interim buildings on Rosalind Franklin Straße, the first buildings that are on the site of the new research home of the cluster. The groups of Microverse Professor Bas Dutilh (Viral Ecology) and Junior Group Leader Amelia Barber (Fungal Informatics) are the first residents, and along with Cluster speaker Prof. Kirsten Küsel, offered welcoming words and tours of the new meeting and laboratory spaces. They have been hard at work since moving into the spaces in 2022.

A highlight of the event was the unveiling of new artwork by Erfurt artist Lilian Hünniger, who worked with the scientists to representatively portray the vast diversity of organisms that will be studied in the building - bacteria, fungi, and viruses, with a prominently featured depiction of DNA to highlight the highly genetic focus of the research that occurs in the labs of Barber and Dutilh. More information about the artist can be found here.   

The inauguration of the interim buildings is one of the first steps in the long road to the Microverse research complex, of which completion is expected in 2024, with research groups moving in during the year of 2025.

Photo source: Angela Köhler