Wide Hybridization Group

Our group is studying various aspects of interspecific and intergeneric hybridization and polyploidization. We use molecular cytogenetics, flow cytometry, bioinformatics, genomics and molecular biology techiques to analyze genome composition, evolution and function of hybrid genomes. Our objects are Festuca x Lolium hybrids (Festulolium) and hybrids of wheat x rye and wheat x barley.

Our current topics cover:

  •           meiosis and genome stability of wide hybrids
  •           3D organization of hybrid nucleus
  •           parental-specific gene expression
As we are interested in meiosis, we made illustrations of complete meiosis using Lolium x Festuca hybrids.

We are members of Eucarpia Fodder Crops and Amenity Grasses Section - webpage

News:

  • October 2023: Our collaboration with Vaclav Mahelka and Karol Krak (Institute of Botany ASCR) on nucleolar dominance in Festuloliums resulted in the paper published in Frontiers in Plant Science
  • September 2023: David co-organized EUCARPIA Fodder Crops and Amenity Grasses conference in Brno. 
  • September 2023: Jana Szecówka was awarded for the best poster at Plant Chromosome Biology conference. Congratulations! Mehrdad gave his first talk at the scientific conference there. Great job! 
  • September 2023: We made a group (bike) trip - everybody survived :-)
  • August 2023: Paper of Petr Fajkus on the telomeres and telomerases with our contribution was published in New Phytologist 
  • March, 2023: Paper of Beat and David on mysterious triploid hybrids has been published in Alpine Botany
  • March, 2023: Our paper on non-Mendelian inheritance in Festuca x Lolium hybrids has been published in New Phytologist
  • January, 2023: Marek Szecówka joined our group as bioinformatician. Welcome!
  • November, 2022: Mehrdad Shahbazi joined our group as PhD student. Welcome! 
  • August, 2022: Marek Glombik left our group to his first postdoc in a group of Phillippa Borrill at JIC. Good luck and thank you Marek!!!
  • June, 2022: Our review "Interspecific hybridization and plant breeding: From historical retrospective through work of Mendel to current crops​" was published in Czech Journal of Genetics and Plant Breeding. (link)
  • March, 2022: Our project on Cytonuclear interactions in plant auto- and allopolyploids will be funded by Czech Science Foundation (GACR) in 2022-2024.
  • March, 2022: Our new paper on genome dominance in Allium hybrids has been released (link)
  • Fabruary, 2022: Katerina Pernickova left our group. Katka: good luck in new career!
  • January, 2022: Joanna has a baby! Welcome little Laura! 
  • December, 2021: Our Co-PI project entitled 'Ultimate screening of wild barley genomes for panicoid DNA: a further step towards delimiting the foreign-ome in Hordeum' will be funded by Czech Science Foundation (GACR) in 2022-2024.
  • May 27, 2021: Festulolium book released! David and Arek Kosmala (IGR, Poznan, Poland) compiled a Festulolium book consisting of 14 review and research papers about genetics, physiology, ecology and breeding value of our beloved hybrid (pdf version available here).

Vacancies:

MSc. and Bc. studies
If you think you are real hard-worker willing to do overtime work in lab with a lot of enthusiasm and responsibility, you are welcome to contact us on kopecky@ueb.cas.cz

Projects

Publications