A new laboratory belonging to Max Planck Society will come into being as an affiliated unit of the Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology and Małopolskie Centrum Biotechnologii. It is a great honour for the Jagiellonian University to start the collaboration with Max Planck Society which belongs to one of the world's most prestigious research organizations. The laboratory is to conduct research on the molecular biology of plants. It remains to be seen which Max Planck institute will be co-operating with the laboratory in Kraków and who will be in charge of the unit. There is an international competition which aims at selecting the leader of the research team.

"Fourteen candidates entered the competition including experts from Finland, Greece, Bangladesh and China. Up till now we have shortlisted three candidates who will be subject to further review", says Wojciech Fornisz, the Dean of the Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology.

On 26 January 2011 the Committee consisting of Polish and German experts organised a symposium whose objective was to select the leader out of the three candidates. Among the presentations delivered were Dr Roosa Laitinen's presentation entitled "Hybrid incompatibility in Arabidopsis thaliana" and Dr Tadeusz Wróblewski's (University of California, Davis USA) lecture on "Genomic Approaches to dissect complex plant-microbe interactions". The third candidate failed to turn up. The Committee was impressed by Dr Roosa Laitinen's presentation and, as a result, considers her the most serious candidate for the leader of the new laboratory.

Max Planck Laboratory will be the second one of its kind in Poland. The already existing one is affiliated with the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw.