Department Head
Staff Members
- dr Małgorzata Heidorn-Czarna
- dr Małgorzata Kwaśniak-Owczarek
- dr Urszula Kaźmierczak
- mgr Agata Sado-Guźda
PhD Students
(room 2.09)
- mgr Artur Tomal
- mgr Agata Maziak
- mgr Błażej Przystajko
Research Topics
- Organellar cross-talk: nucleus, mitochondria and chloroplasts
- Regulation of expression of the mitochondrial genome at the level of translation
- Mitochondrial protein quality control system
- The role of mitochondria in plant development and stress response
The projects integrate various approaches of molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, as well as systems biology (transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics). We work with plant model organism – Arabidopsis thaliana.
Our laboratory equipment
- Light Cycler 2.0 (Roche)
- Thermocyclers (Biometra) and gradient thermal cycler (MJ Research PTC–200)
- UV–1800 Spectrophotometer (Shimadzu)
- Centrifuges – Sigma K15 and 3K18
- Ultracentrifuge CP100NX (Hitachi)
- Electroporator (Bio-Rad)
- Deep freezer – 85°C (Snijders Scientific)
- Certoclav LGA
- Clark electrode, Oxytherm (Hansatech)
- Growth environmental Versalink test chambers (Sanyo)
- System for performance 2–D gel electrophoresis based on isoelectric focusing, IEF (Hoefer IEF100, PROTEAN Bio-Rad)
- Delta 2–D software for advanced 2–D gel image analysis (DECODON)
- Gel Doc EZ system for DNA and protein gel imaging (Bio-Rad)
- G:BOX system for high performance fluorescence and chemiluminescence gel imaging (Syngene)
Selected publications
Current research projects
- Identification of new components of the plant mitochondrial proteolytic system in comparison to the yeast homologues (National Science Centre, project Sonata 2011/03/D/NZ1/00562, 2012-2016, dr Iwona Migdał)
- The role of mitochondrial AtFtsH4 protease in biogenesis of mitochondria during germination of Arabidopsis thaliana (National Science Centre, project Opus 2012/07/B/NZ2/01794, 2013-2017, dr Małgorzata Czarna)
- At23 and FtsH4 proteaes as putative regulators of phospholipids in Arabidopsis thaliana mitochondrial membranes (National Science Centre, project Preludium/ 2013/11/N/NZ3/00061, 2014-2016, mgr Renata Skibior)
- Effect of the changes in mitochondrial translation on expression of chloroplast genome and chloroplasts-to-nucleus communication (National Science Centre, project Sonata 2013/11/D/NZ1/00288, 2014-2017, dr Małgorzata Kwaśniak-Owczarek)
- Make a jump into understanding of selective ribosome-dependent translation in plant mitochondria (National Science Centre, project Opus 2014/15/B/NZ2/01065, 2015-2018, prof. dr hab. Hanna Jańska)
- Fold or remove – the double function of FtsH4 in maintaining mitochondrial proteostasis in Arabidopsis thaliana (National Science Centre, project Fuga 2015/16/S/NZ3/00364, 2015-2018, dr Magdalena Opalińska)
