Press release: Award for bioinformatician
No. 112 - 01.09.2026
Dr Jaccoline Zegers receives the Wilhelm Pfeffer Prize for doctoral thesis at the University of Göttingen
Bioinformatician Dr Jaccoline Zegers has been awarded the Wilhelm Pfeffer Prize by the German Society for Plant Sciences (DBG) for her doctoral thesis, which she completed at the University of Göttingen. Every year, the DBG honours scientists for outstanding achievements in plant research. The Wilhelm Pfeffer Prize is worth 2,500 euros. The award ceremony will take place on 9 September 2026 at the DBG’s international botany conference in Bochum.
In her work at the Department of Applied Bioinformatics at the University of Göttingen, Zegers investigated how the ancestors of land plants developed mechanisms to cope with drought and water stress millions of years ago – long before plants even colonised the land. In order to reconstruct the evolution at that time, she established new analytical and molecular genetic methods for several groups of ornamental algae (Zygnematophyceae) that are most closely related to land plants. Unlike in better-studied model species, these methods had not previously been applied to ornamental algae.
As she discovered by comparing four ornamental algae with two land plants, their defence mechanisms prior to the transition to land – such as flexible cell walls – were indeed similar. However, the hormonal signals that regulate protection against dehydration – for example, via the plant hormone abscisic acid – only changed as evolution progressed. Zegers’ genomic studies and bioinformatic analyses have been published in renowned specialist journals and are now available to basic research as robust methods and comprehensive datasets (transcriptomics and proteomics) for investigating the evolution of complex traits in plants in greater depth.
Original publication: Jaccoline Zegers (2026). Evolutionary conservation of the hyperosmotic response in the closest algal relatives of land plants. PhD thesis, University of Göttingen. https://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-12081.
Contact:
Professor Jan de Vries
University of Göttingen
Faculty of Biology and Psychology
Applied Bioinformatics
Phone: +49 551 39-23755