FunChi meeting in Madrid
This year’s Spring meeting of the European Research Area - Industrial Biotechnology research project FunChi was organized by Prof. Antonio Molina from the renowned Centre of Biotechnology and Genomics of Plants at the Polytechnical University of Madrid. Our Spanish industrial partner Plant Response Biotech has its laboratories at the same place. Our German industrial partner Weiss BioTech was represented by Dr. Mareike Dirks-Hofmeister, and our Dutch academic partner Leiden University by Prof. Arthur Ram and Tim Leeuwe, while Prof. Peter Punt from Dutch DNA unfortunately could not join the meeting. From our German academic partner,, the University of Münster, Prof. Dr. Bruno Moerschbacher and Dr. Nour Eddine El Gueddari were accompanied by Anna Niehues, Soofia Khanamadi, and Jasper Wattjes. All partners, presented their results of the first year of the project, and defined the plans for the coming six months. Most importantly, we decided on joint protocols for the isolation and characterization of the fungal cell walls and of the chitin extracted from them. We also agreed on additional materials such as reference chitosans and Arabidopsis strains to be exchanged and on exchange visits of our students to make best use of the synergistic potential of the different competences and infrastructures of the project partners. We will meet again in January 2018 in Leiden in the Netherlands.
