FrantiAek BaluAka studied at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. After his doctorate he worked at the Institute of Botany, Slovak Academy of Sciences (Bratislava, Slovakia), and completed two post-doctoral programmes supported by the Royal Society (London) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Bonn) in Bristol and Bonn. During that time, he focused on the cell biology of the plant cytoskeleton, especially as related to growth and polarity of cells in the root apex. He now is lecturer and associate researcher at the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany in Bonn, Germany. His current main research interest is the signal-mediated interaction between membrane trafficking and the cytoskeleton in the two plant model species Zea mays and Arabidopsis thaliana.

Diedrik Menzel graduated at theFree University of Berlin (Germany) in 1982. He was a predoctoral research fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Melbourne, and a postdoctoral research associate at the Departments of Botany and Zoology of the University of California at Berkeley. In 1988 he habilitated at the Faculty of Biology, University of Heidelberg, and became a leader of the Plant Cytoskeleton Group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Cell Biology in Ladenburg. In 1996 he was appointed full professor in Plant Cell Biology at the University of Bonn. His work is related to cell architecture and morphogenesis in higher plants and algae. The emphasis of his current work is on actin cytoskeleton and endomembrane dynamics, as well as the molecular architecture of plant myosins. His other interests include gene expression and intracellular transport of mRNA in the unicellular green alga Acetabularia.