Contributing Scientist
Ludger Wessjohann
Leibniz-Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB), Department Bioorganic Chemistry
- Contribution: Access to assays on plant physiology/growth with many test organisms: Lemna minor (dicot, MTP), Arabidopsis thaliana (dicot), Lolium perenne (monocot), larger plants if required (tomato, barley, medicago, rape etc.), assays on pathogens (mostly plant pathogens), fungi and oomycete, nematocides, bacteria, cancer cell lines. Access to compound and extract collections of ca. 20.000 compounds of mostly unique, commercially unavailable isolated natural products of plant and mushroom origin, as well as synthetic compounds, and ca. 2000 extracts of plants and fungi world wide.
- Research interest: Bioactive natural and synthetic compounds, medicinal chemistry (incl. bioinformatics, computational chemistry and virtual screening). Application areas: Antiinfectives (mostly against plant pathogens), Anticancer compounds, Neuroactive compounds (Taste, Learning, Neurodegeneration), Plant Protection and Plant Growt.
- Expertise: Research at the IPB focuses on the chemical diversity, the biosynthesis, the biological roles, and the mechanisms of action of plant and fungal natural products, with an emphasis on specialized metabolites and signaling molecules. Our aim is to develop a comprehensive molecular understanding of the adaptive and developmental processes which plants evolved as a consequence of their dynamic interaction with the environment. The resulting changes in gene expression and phenotype are analyzed in interdisciplinary approaches at the genome, proteome and foremost at the metabolome level.