New doctoral candidate: Mouna started her PhD project in chitosan enzymology

Today, Mounashree has started her PhD project under the direct supervision of Dr. Ratna Singh, our bioinformatician. Ratna is about to establish her own small research group within our group, with financial support of a BMBF grant expected to come soon. After obtaining her BSc in Biochemistry, Biotechnology and Microbiology and her MSc in Biochemistry at the University of Mysore in India, Mouna worked for two years as a research intern in the Plant Cell Biotechnology department of a local CSIR Institute (the Indian equivalent of German Fraunhofer institutes), then for one-and-a-half years as a research assistant in the Institute of Plant Nutrition at the University of Hannover, and finally for about one year at the Centre for Plant Systems Biology of the University of Ghent in Belgium. We feel very fortunate to have won a new PhD candidate with such a strong research experience already. Mouna will be working on chitin synthases and chitin deacetylases, first in silico, then also in vitro. Her goal will be to understand the process of chitosan biosynthesis in more detail, and its role in pathogenicity and virulence of plant pathogenic fungi. Mouna, we are glad to have you in our team, and we wish you a good start in Münster and in chitosan enzymology. Welcome!