Bio-Fun @ Plant 2030: Dr. Ratna Singh and her team presented their Indo-German Bioeconomy International project “Bio-Fun” at this year’s BMBF Status Seminar

This week saw the Annual Meeting of Plant Research funded by BMBF (the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) to which Dr. Ratna Singh and her team working on the Bio-Fun project were invited. This year, ca. 150 scientists participated in the online event, representing some 30+ projects, some of them huge collaborative efforts, and some – like ours – much smaller projects. Our Bio-Fun project aims at the development of novel fungicides based on chitin synthases and chitin deacetylases as targets. Ratna was invited to orally present an overview of the status of this project, while two master students involved in the project presented their work on posters. Naike Schwenner and Denis Qoraj showed their results on novel chitin deacetylase and chitin synthase inhibitors, respectively. Both of them had also recorded short poster videos which were available during the poster sessions and throughout the conference. Using in silico screening approaches followed by in vitro and in vivo verification, the Bio-Fun team, including our research technician Christin Meier, has successfully identified lead compounds for both target enzymes. Comprehensive in silico analyses allowed to design potential optimisation strategies for these compounds to increase their affinity or specificity. Our Indian partners, Prof. Ramu Sridhar Perali and Prof. Rengarajan Balamurugan from the University of Hyderabad, are currently synthesising some of these derivatives and we are looking forward to testing them in the lab. – At the beginning of the conference, the Plant 2030 team presented the Plant 2030 Academy, its activities and its website which offers a number of highly interesting online real-life workshops – well worth visiting!