Philipp Lemke successfully defended his PhD thesis

Today, Philipp Lemke successfully defended his PhD thesis, supported by his first and second referees, Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher and Prof. Dirk Prüfer, from our institute, as well as his third doctoral committee member, Dr. Andreas Kortekamp, from the State Education and Research Center of Viticulture, Horticulture and Rural Development (DLR) Rheinpfalz, our collaborator in the smartBioS project. Philipp had initially started his doctoral project in the framework of the Indo-German CuChi-BCA project on triple combinations of nano-formulated chitosans, copper-based fungicides, and biocontrol Trichoderma strains. However, while this project had been extremely successful from an application point of view, it was eventually less rewarding from the scientific point of view. Philipp then extended this work to incorporate results from a previous doctoral project, focusing on synergistic interactions of different chitosans in their antifungal and plant strengthening activities. Due to his systematic approach, we now have a much better understanding of this surprising effect which we intend to use for the improvement of chitosan-based agricultural products. He then continued with our first comprehensive transcriptomic experiment on chitosan-induced changes in gene expression in plants - with highly surprising results which we are currently preparing for publication. Thank you, Philipp, for your excellent work which has revealed new avenues into a subject which we are already pursuing for such a long time!