Judith Ryll successfully defended her Master thesis: “Comparative analysis of differential gene expressionin response to different chitosans across different plant species”.

Today, Judith Ryll successfully defended her Master thesis on a comparative analysis of transcriptomic data from different plant species treated with different, well-defined chitosans, supported by Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher, and by Prof. Shuqing Xu from the Institute of Evolution and Biodiversity. We know that different chitosans can have different effects on plants, such as growth promotion or induction of disease resistance or stress tolerance. But we do not understand why this is so, and which pathways in the plants are induced. Therefore, we began transcriptomic analyses using RNAseq. First, Philipp Lemke in his doctoral project analysed the effects of chitosans on potato; more recently, Soofia Khanahmadi and Naivy Nava followed with RNAseq data from chitosan-treated tobacco and tomato plants in the framework of their doctoral projects on chitosan-induced virus and nematode resistance, respectively; and Dr.Carolin Richter collected RNAseq data from chitosan-treated Arabidopsis plants. All of these experiments were performed in such a way that there were overlaps in the chitosans used, and in the time points for harvesting the treated plants. Judith, supervised by Dr.Ratna Singh, the bioinformatician in our group, took over the daunting task of comparing all of these data! And yes, it made sense! We now know which chitosans are best to boost photosynthesis and growth, and which ones best induce disease resistance. And fortunately, Judith keeps helping us with making sense of our increasing RNAseq data.