Fellowship granted: Dr. Laís Granato from Brazil won a three-months stay-at-home fellowship for a joint project on using chitosans to combat bacterial diseases of plants

Today, we were informed that the proposal of Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher for a post-doctoral fellowship from the internationalization fund of our university for Dr. Laís Moreira Granato from the Universidade Federal de Vicosa in Brazil has been successful. Laís is an experienced phytopathologist who has focused on bacterial diseases of crop plants and trees. Climate change is leading to drier, hotter summers in many parts of the world, and while this weakens fungal plant pathogens which prefer colder and more humid environments, bacteria tend to thrive under these conditions. This is one reason why bacterial diseases are currently developing into global, and often unchecked, threats. Of course, the large-scale use of antibiotics to fight plant-pathogenic bacteria is counter-indicated as it would undoubtedly lead to the development of resistant strains, and these could easily pass on their resistance genes to human-pathogenic bacteria, with potentially catastrophic consequences. We have good experiences with antibacterial activities of chitosans, so we have long wanted to try and use them on phytopathogenic bacteria, but we are not registered to work with dangerous quarantine organisms. This is why our planned collaboration with Laís promises to be a real win-win-win- situation – for her, for us, for farmers, for customers, for the planet. This will be just the beginning: Laís has already applied for a research project in Brasil, in collaboration with us and our start-ups, greEnCAP and AgriBluBio.