MIE celebrates Plant Health, featuring Adam Anaia

Picture: © S. Bernhardt/iDiv.

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MIE celebrates Plant Health, featuring Adam Anaia: “I am Redouan Adam Anaia from the Netherlands. During my bachelor in Molecular Life Sciences, I became intrigued by plant chemodiversity and its role for human and plant health. I decided to start a master in plant breeding and during my internship, I have studied constitutive defense mechanisms of Solanum dulcamara against gastropods.  During my thesis, I dived into the amazing world of volatiles organic compounds as indirect defense mechanisms of Capsicum annuum towards cell-content feeders. Together, these experiences have broadened my knowledge and interest in plant-herbivore interactions, chemical ecology and plant breeding.

Currently, I am working on S. dulcamara again, as part of the DFG-funded research unit “Ecology and Evolution of Intraspecific Chemodiversity of Plants”. I conduct my research at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in the Molecular Interaction Ecology group of Nicole van Dam. Here, I take a multidisciplinary approach in order to unravel the molecular mechanisms and ecological consequences of steroidal glycoalkaloid (SGA) diversity in S. dulcamara. I will perform a comprehensive metabolomic analysis of different plant parts; synthesize artificial SGA variation and employ these in preference assays and perform a field trial in which monoculture plots will be compared with more chemically diverse plots. I am convinced that the knowledge that is generated in my research will aid the breeding of solanaceous crops to become more resilient against herbivores.”