New project: Dr. Ratna Singh’s Bioeconomy International project “Bio-Fun” on in silico development of chitin synthase and chitin deacetylase inhibitors will be funded by BMBF

Today, we received the formal granting letter from BMBF indicating that Dr. Ratna Singh’s project on the in silico development of chitin synthase and chitin deacetylase inhibitors has been approved for funding by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF. This is another Indo-German project in the framework of the Bioeconomy International program of BMBF, this time with two partners from University of Hyderabad, namely Prof. Rengarajan Balamurugan and Prof. Perali Ramu Sridhar. Together with a doctoral student to be appointed, Ratna will use state-of-the-art bioinformatics tools, originally developed for pharmaceutical purposes, to design enzyme inhibitors targeting fungal chitin and chitosan synthesis. The two Indian partners, synthetic chemists with ample experience in the synthesis of carbohydrate analogues, will synthesise promising candidate inhibitors, and our German team supported by a research technician to be appointed will heterologously express selected fungal genes for chitin synthases and chitin deacetylases, to then experimentally test the inhibitory activity of these compounds. Finally, selected inhibitors will be tested for their ability to inhibit fungal growth in vitro and fungal disease development in crop plants in vivo, in collaboration with the start-up company Bex-Biotech. We are convinced that this new approach, which is based on our decades-long research into the role of chitin and chitosans in plant-pathogen interactions, will complement our ongoing strategies towards developing novel, knowledge-based plant disease protection strategies.