“You’re in luck—somebody is just about to leave. There’s still one spot to the left of the sign!” One thing was immediately clear, even before you’d parked your car: heavy rain earlier that Sunday morning hadn’t dampened interest in the open house at Klein-Altendorf Campus.For this year’s event, Klein-Altendorf Campus of the Faculty of Agricultural, Nutritional, and Engineering Sciences co-presented with the bio-innovationpark Rheinland in honor of its tenth anniversary. As always, there was also a tractor taxi and tours of the experimental fields and orchards.

It is a huge success for the University of Bonn: in the nationwide excellence competition, all six of the university's existing Clusters of Excellence were selected for further funding on 22 May 2025 and, in addition, both newly applied Bonn cluster initiatives will also receive funding. Among the clusters to receive further funding is the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence of the Faculty of Agricultural, Nutritional and Engineering Sciences - the only cluster in Germany in the field of agriculture.

Frank Hochholdinger, professor for Crop Functional Genomics at the INRES and Carolin Marcon, project leader of the BonnMu group, were honored with the 2025 Maize Genetics Cooperator Award by the Maize Genetics Cooperation at the 67th maize genetics conference in St. Louis, USA.

After all the preparations had been made, our group from INRES - Crop Functional Genomics consisting of Dr. Zhihui Wen, Dr. Xiaoming He, Ben Wilhelm Braun and Alena Albrecht left Bonn for Madagascar in February. At the airport in Frankfurt we met two colleagues from the IPK in Gatersleben, Dr. Ivan Lopez-Valdivia and Dr. Matias Schierenbeck and together we started our journey to Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar.

Cay Schäfer was awarded the DMK (Deutsches Maiskomitee) Prize for Young Scientists 2024 for her master's thesis “Crosstalk between the micronutrient boron and the phytohormone auxin on the level of polar auxin transport during primary root development of maize (Zea mays)”. In addition, her master thesis was selected as best master thesis in Plant Sciences at the University of Bonn in 2024 by the DBG (Deutsche Botanische Gesellschaft). The master thesis was done in the Department Crop Functional Genomics in the project group Boron Deficiency (Dr. Michaela Matthes).

What has been known up until now as the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Bonn is being renamed the Faculty of Agricultural, Nutritional, and Engineering Sciences with immediate effect. The faculty is taking this step in order to better reflect the specialist fields that it covers by giving equal weight to the nutritional and engineering sciences alongside the agricultural sciences.

In October 2024, Peng Yu was appointed professor for Plant Genetics at the TU Munich School of Life Sciences.

From Sep 2nd to Sep 4th the annual conference of the German Society for Plant Nutrition (DGP) was held in the beautiful Poppelsdorf Castle. The conference was locally hosted and organized by the INRES -Plant Nutrition.