Half-annual consortium meeting of the smartBioS project in Neustadt an der Weinstraße

This week, the German partners of the Indo-German smartBioS project, financially supported by the Bioeconomy International programme of BMBF, met in Neustadt an der Weinstraße in Southern Germany, on the premises of DLR, the State Education and Research Center of Viticulture, Horticulture and Rural Development of the state of Rhineland Palatinate. Bruno Moerschbacher was accompanied by Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr and Sabrina Stritzel, while Dr. Carolin Richter and Dr. Ratna Singh who are also part of the smartBioS consortium could not join us this time. Our hosts were Dr. Andreas Kortekamp and Verena Küpper who gave us a short introduction into their organisation before reporting on their side of the project, i.e. identification, characterization, and optimisation of copper-tolerant, wood-colonizing, and chitosanolytic Trichoderma strains with biocontrol activity, as well as their field trials using our different, well characterised chitosans. Then, Bruno gave a short overview on our work on plant protective chitosans before presenting Ratna’s results on the in silico modelling of chitosan-copper interactions. Finally, Stefan reported on Caro’s work characterising the molecular and cellular modes of action of enzymatically modified chitosans in plants and his own results on monitoring phytohormone levels in plants upon chitosan treatment. At half-time of the project, we have a very satisfying, broad spectrum of highly promising results clearly exceeding expectations, and so the second day of the meeting was dedicated to identifying the focal areas of our research efforts during the second half of the project. And of course, we also had an interesting visit to the site, including a close inspection of our field trials.