Noticias

Dirk Berkelmann se encuentra realizando su trabajo posdoctoral, segundo año, en el laboratorio del Dr. Andrés Gatica en la Escuela de Biología.

Dirk, hizo su doctorado en Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Alemania en el área de Genómica y Microbiología  Aplicada. Inició sus carrera como estudiante de bachillerato de la Universidad de Bremen en el área de Biología.

Sobre su trabajo y proyecto en el que esta realizando su estancia posdoctoral nos indica:

"Coffee is one of the most important beverages worldwide and thus plays a significant role for the economy of the coffee-producing countries like Costa Rica. Consequently, pathogens like the rust fungus Hemileia vastratix can severely impact the success of crop cultivation and therefore require close attention and measures for prevention. Additionally, climate change further promotes pathogen epidemics because of elevated temperatures and changed rainfall patterns, which are crucial factors for pathogenic fungi.

One factor in the attempts to control these pathogens are the interactions of the pathogen with the host and the present microbiome in the phyllosphere (Leveau, 2019). Even though initial studies were carried out to investigate the microbial communities in the host tissue, none were performed in Costa Rica so far. This gap is of relevance, since previous studies have shown that endophytic communities can vary significantly according to the geographical area.

To close this gap, this project attempts to unravel the bacterial and fungal communities of the phyllosphere in coffee plants (Coffea arabica L.). The project follows two approaches: First microbial community profiles associated to rust infections will be analyzed via extraction of DNA from leaf tissue adjacent to an infection and subsequent marker gene amplification (16S rRNA for bacteria and ITS2 for fungi) and sequencing. These sequences will then be used to characterize the endophytic bacterial community and diversity profiles. Secondly, bacterial and fungal isolates will be cultivated from infected leaf tissue. These isolates will then be characterized by Sanger Sequencing of marker genes with the potential of discovering previously uncultured participants of the endophytic community. This project will be carried out with inclusion of student projects as well as collaborations with other research groups of the University of Costa Rica.

The results of this study will not only give a first look to rust infection related endophytic communities in coffee plants based in Costa Rica but will also enable further projects to deepen the understanding of the interactions between pathogen, hostplant and the respective microbiome. Possible approaches for this would be functional characterizations of microbial communities by metagenomic shotgun sequencing or the impact of different cultivation regimes on the plant microbiome in the phyllo- or rhizosphere.