Soofia Khanahmadi successfully defended her PhD thesis

Today, Soofia Khanahmadi successfully defended her doctoral thesis, supported by her committee members Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher, PD Dr. Gundula Noll from our institute, and Dr. Sybille Unsicker from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena. Soofia had secured a doctoral fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), initially planning to develop enzymatic tools for the extraction of natural chitosans from fungal cell walls. The plan was to study the fractions and patterns of acetylation of chitosans produced in vivo and the influence of these structural parameters on their biological activities. However, we faced unexpected problems with the analytical tools required for this task so that Soofia decided to investigate instead the influence of these parameters in chitosans produced in vitro, with an emphasis on antiviral activities. To this end, she won Dr. Noll’s support who is an expert on plant viruses. During her careful and broad studies, she observed, among other things, that non-treated control plants growing in the vicinity of chitosan-treated plants became resistant to viral attack, probably due to plant-to-plant communication via volatile signal molecules. To study these, she made contact with Dr. Unsicker, an expert on plant volatile organic compounds. Despite the problems created by Corona during the last year of the doctoral project which typically is the most productive one, Soofia managed to accumulate a lot of highly interesting data, not least because she is really creative when it comes to developing new bioassays. Fortunately, she will continue working with us for a little longer and Corona permitting, we will finalize some very nice manuscripts during this time!