Lisa Kappel

I am a postdoc at KTH Division of Glycoscience and have a PhD in molecular microbiology. My research focuses on sustainable agriculture and I investigate and develop new treatments against plant pathogenic fungi and oomycetes as alternatives to current petrochemical pesticides. I am especially interested in the relationship between carbohydrate metabolism, mycoparasitism and plant pathogen fitness.
Currently, I am a researcher in the NoPest project (H2020 FetOpen http://www.h2020nopest.org/), which assesses the potential of newly developed sustainable tools for pest management in agriculture to decrease the pathogen burden in wine and crop production.

Areas of research and expertise

heterologous production and characterization of carbohydrate-active enzymes; production of bioactive materials from biomass; sustainable agriculture; regulatory mechanisms governing clustered gene expression; genomics; fungal-fungal and fungal-plant interactions; fungal cell wall architecture; biochemistry and molecular biology of fungi, oomycetes, yeasts, bacteria and plants; drug discovery; life cell imaging

Background

Coming from a background of fundamental research in yeast genetics and biochemistry during my PhD, I focus mainly on the contribution of fungal cell wall carbohydrates to virulence of filamentous plant pathogens and fitness of plant beneficial mycoparasites. Moreover, I am interested in catabolic gene clusters related to carbohydrate metabolism in filamentous fungi, and I identified transcriptional regulators that significantly contribute to fungal fitness and virulence. In addition, I characterized and designed a production stream to extract chitosan from fungal biomass using a novel set of fungal carbohydrate active enzymes in previous applied research projects, based in Vienna and Innsbruck, Austria. Chitosan is a fungicidal cell wall biopolymer that has promising applications in agriculture and medicine.

The project I am currently involved in combines a lot of my expertise. NoPest (H2020 FetOpen http://www.h2020nopest.org/) investigates the potential of a new environmentally friendly approach for treatment of downy mildew of grapes and potato late blight as an alternative to conventional chemical pesticides.
In this project I investigate the role of the cell wall and related enzymes that serve as virulence factors of important agricultural oomycete plant pathogens in wine and crop production. I study their susceptibility towards a newly developed generation of innovative and environmentally safe pesticides. Our aim is to contribute to the transformation to a safer and more sustainable agriculture.