Tobi Weikert successfully defended his PhD thesis

Today, Tobias Weikert successfully defended his PhD thesis with a public presentation and discussion of his research results followed by a closed examination with his doctoral committee consisting of the professors Bruno Moerschbacher, Susanne Fetzner from the Institute for Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology, and Francisco Goycoolea from Leeds University. Tobi had already performed his Master thesis with us in which he had generated a number of mutants of a bacterial chitosanase to improve our Chitosan Affinity Protein CAP, an artificial, chitosan-specific lectin. In his PhD project which was supported by the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt DBU, he has now investigated - together with his Master student Eva Regel and our postdocs Ratna Singh and Stefan Cord-Landwehr and supported by his fellow doctoral candidate Anna Niehues - the abilities of this chitosanase and its mutants, as well as a range of other chitosanases, to produce well-defined chitosan oligomers with improved plant protecting activities. He not only devised a new classification for chitosanases, but he was able to come up with a hypothesis concerning the mode of action of different chitosan oligomers in plants, a hypothesis that will guide our future investigations in this respect. Meanwhile, Tobi has joined Dr. Rebecca Melcher to support her team in building up her biotech start-up “Bex Biotech”.