Affiliation: ETH Zurich

Dr. Aditya Nayak is a biochemist based at the Plant Evolutionary Genetics Group at the Institute of Molecular Plant Biology, ETH Zurich. Dr. Nayak received his PhD in integrated structural biology from the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA, Grenoble) and Université Grenoble Alpes (Grenoble, France) in 2019, where he worked on understanding molecular mechanisms behind temperature sensing in plants using an integrated structural biology approach. Since August 2019 he is a researcher at the IMPB, ETH Zurich. His current research is to understand molecular mechanisms that are behind the formation and assembly of the Meiotic Synaptonemal Complex (SC) in plants. He studies naturally occurring variants of the SC proteins from diploid and tetraploid Arabidopsis arenosa populations with an aim to screen for variants that might lead to stable meiosis at a higher temperature. Such protein variants could be useful mainly in the context of climate change and global warming.