April 21, 2022: Katharina Eickelpasch successfully defended her Master thesis: “Microphenotyping: Effects of chitosan on abiotic stress tolerance in Arabidopsis thaliana”

Today, Katharina Eickelpasch successfully defended her Master thesis, supported by Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher and Dr. Shane O'Connell from the Irish company Brandon Bioscience with whom we have been collaborating on plant biostimulant activities for some time. Initially, Katharina had planned to perform part of her thesis work in Shane's group, but this never materialized due to the continuing Corona situation. While we have worked for decades on the structure-function relationship concerning plant disease resistance-inducing activities of chitosans, we only rather recently began to perform similarly systematic investigations into the role of the structural parameters degree of polymerization and degree of acetylation for plant stress tolerance-inducing or growth promoting activities. For reasons we still do not quite understand, the bioassays required for quantification of these latter activities are notoriously unreliable, and this made Katharina spend a lot of time in optimizing protocols. Thanks to her meticulous work, she finally managed to reliably obtain reproducible results, and these revealed, for the first time, a fundamental difference in the structure-function relationships of different bioactivities of chitosans in plants. This observation has dramatic consequences for the development of chitosan-based plant biopesticides and biostimulants. Consequently, our post-doctoral researchers Dr. Carolin Richter and Dr. Sruthi Sreekumar, co-founders of the planned start-up greEnCAP, offered Katharina a position in the framework of their start-up Transfer.NRW project, helping them to optimize their chitosan-stabilized