Congratulations! Lea Theile successfully defended her Master thesis on “Investigating the influence of chitosan structure on a plant’s defense mechanisms in Phaseolus vulgaris”.

Today, Lea Theile - one of our last (but not yet the last) Master candidates successfully defended her MSc thesis in front of our still not so small research group, and supported by her two “opponents”, her formal supervisor Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher as well as her second reviewer, Prof. Maik Böhmer from the University of Frankfurt. Directly supervised by Dr. Carolin Richter, Head of our sub-group on chitosan bioactivities, and supported by our doctoral candidate Katharina Eickelpasch, in whose project Lea’s thesis was embedded, she focused on RT-qPCR to quantitatively investigate the influence of several well-characterized chitosans on the expression of a number of tell-tale genes which are centrally involved in different physiological responses of plants to environmental stimuli. Lea has done a perfect job, particularly because she meticulously performed all the controls crucially needed but all too often ignored in setting up this kind of experiments. She became a true master, yielding for the first time RT-qPCR data that are fully convincing and trustworthy on the crucial influence of the degrees of polymerization and acetylation as well as the pattern of acetylation on plant-related bioactivities of chitosans. Her data perfectly align with other results from Carolin’s group, clearly showing that different chitosans induce different aspects of plant disease resistance. Of course, this is crucial for the development and improvement of chitosan-based agro-biologics, such as plant biostimulants and biopesticides which are urgently needed for a more sustainable agriculture. As such, Lea’s thesis will support the development of our start-up’s next generation of agricultural products based on third generation chitosans. Well done, Lea! And congratulations to an exciting job you have already started right after submitting your thesis.