by Tristan Zellmann (doctoral student at Leipzig University): I had the opportunity to stay at Jens Meilers lab in Nashville from 11/27/13 to 12/06/13 as well as from 01/27/14 to 03/22/14 to complete the modeling for an upcoming publication. During my stay, I had the opportunity to take part in two great, american traditions – arriving the day just before Thanksgiving, I got invited to an actual Thanksgiving dinner, featuring delicious turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, buttery carrots and even pumpkin pie. Another culinary and cultural highlight was a super bowl party complete with chili, buffalo wings and lots of snacks, even if the Seattle Seahawks seemed to dominate a bit too
by Lizzy Wanka (doctoral student at Leipzig University): In the autumn of 2013, I had the great opportunity to visit Prof. Dr. Vsevolod V. Gurevich`s lab at the Vanderbilt university for 12 weeks. Prof. Gurevich and his group work with arrestin proteins and investigate among others their binding to receptors and other signaling proteins. I wanted to study the binding of different arrestin mutants to NPY receptors and NPY receptor chimera. Together with Dr. Luis E. D. Gimenez, I performed various bioluminescence resonance energy transfer assays and learned a lot about the arrestin recruitment and the optimization of this assay. The discussions about analyzing the data were revealing and very helpful.