“Bio-Fun “project meeting: ”In Silico Design and Experimental Validation of Bio-Fungicides Targeting Chitin and Chitosan Biosynthesis for Sustainable Plant Disease Protection”

International projects currently suffer from the travel restrictions imposed by the pandemics, so the consortium meeting of our BMBF-funded, Indo-German Bio-Fun project was again a virtual one. But despite the problems, both sides had excellent progress to report. On the German side, the team of Dr. Ratna Singh has grown strongly during the past year, not least because her expertise in bioinformatics was of course particularly precious during Corona times, and on the Indian side, work in the lab has also resumed after a long lockdown. The work on both types of enzymes targeted, chitin synthases and chitin deacetylases, and their inhibitors has progressed well. In silico models of the enzymes have been created, tools for the virtual screening of different compound libraries have been developed, and promising candidates for inhibitors of both enzymes have been identified. Recombinant enzymes are available, test systems for their activities have been established, and the inhibitor activity of some candidate compounds has been verified in vitro, so that lead compounds are available. Hypotheses for structure-activity relationships have been developed in silico and have been used to design structural modifications to further improve inhibitor activities. First derivatives have been synthesised and are about to be sent from Hyderabad to Münster for testing. During the meeting, we made plans for further derivatives based on our recent results, and we hope to be able to test this next generation of inhibitors next year, in time for the final project report. Thanks to the dedication of everyone involved, the project is tremendously successful in spite of the difficult times, and we are looking forward to the patents and publications that will be resulting from it.