Welcome Dr.Vânia Horta de Passo, our new post-doctoral researcher in molecular plant pathology

Today, Dr.Vânia Horta de Passo has joined our group as a post-doctoral researcher, to complement our expertise with her experience in molecular plant pathology and genetics. Vâniastudied Agronomic Engineering and Plant Protection at the University of Lisbon in her home country Portugal,with a MSc project on bacterial pathogens of tomato performed in Portugal and France. She then earned her PhD from the University of Warwick in the UK,studying the Arabidopsis-Xanthomonas campestris pv. raphanipathosystem in great detail. She defined inoculation and phenotyping methods, which allowed her to characterise thephenotypic variation of interactions between a large collection of Arabidopsis natural accessions and differentXcr strains. She was able to identify examples of compatible and incompatible host-pathogen interactions, including differential responses to Xcr races, and she elucidated the molecular genetics behind a specificinteraction by identification of the responsible host resistancegene.After four years of maternity leave, Vânia, together with her husband and two kids, now came to Münster to support our quest to understand the molecular basis of chitosan-induced plant disease resistance. We are very happy to this timely strengthening of our group which will certainly help us to mince the results of our decade-long research on plant-protecting chitosans into successful plant protection products for sustainable agriculture.