Prof. Dr. Roberta Paulert gave a seminar on “Ulvan acting as MAMPs / PAMPs in plant innate immunity”

Today, our former doctoral researcher Roberta Paulert visited us from her sabbatical in Pisa, Italy. Roberta did her PhD with us almost ten years ago, after having been encouraged by her MSc supervisor Prof. Marciel Stadnik from the University of Santa Catarina in Florianopolis, Brazil, and supported by a doctoral fellowship from CNPq/DAAD. She brought green algae of the species Ulva fasciata with her, from which she extracted ulvan and analysed its potential to act as an elicitor or as a priming active agent in monocot and dicot plants. This was the beginning of the “ulvan group” in our lab, in which she was succeeded by Rebecca Melcher and, later, Marten Neumann. As such, she also is one of the intellectual “mothers” of Rebecca’s start up Bex-Biotec which she also briefly visited today. She is now Professor for Biotechnology at the University of Parana in Palotina, Brazil, and currently on sabbatical leave with Profs. Luisa and Laura Pistelli and Prof. Paolo Berni in Pisa. There, she is combining her old work on ulvan with her new research on medicinal plants, analyzing how ulvan and chitosan treatments induce secondary metabolites in e.g. basil. Her initial results indicate that this might be a promising way to boost or manipulate the content of bioactive ingredients in medicinal plants. We have discussed intensely on possible future collaborations, i.a. building on some of Roberta’s old data which appear promising in the light of new findings, on field experiments that Roberta conducted with some of our most promising chitosans on rice plants in Brazil, on Marten’s recombinant ulvan lyases to produced defined ulvan oligomers, and on the bioassays Rebecca is performing in her company. So many opportunities for collaboration! Thanks, Roberta, for taking the initiative to visit us!