The people behind the papers – Leonard Drees and Jochen Rink

Transgenic reporter lines are essential experimental tools for studying molecular processes. Planarian flatworms have emerged as a model of remarkable regenerative abilities, but their use as models of regeneration has been limited by the difficulties in inducing transgenic reporter expression. In a recent study, Leonard Drees, Jochen Rink and colleagues show that the innate immune system of the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea is a key suppressor of transgene expression, and that repression of the conserved innate immunity kinase TBK1 can enhance reporter expression. To learn more about this work and the people behind it, we talked to corresponding author Jochen Rink and both first and corresponding author Leonard Drees, postdoc in the Rink Group at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany.