Soft rot bacteria and their interaction with potato

Speaker: Prof. Minna Pirhonen (University of Helsinki)

Talk: Soft rot bacteria and their interaction with potato

Time: 12th April 2019, 9:00 am

Venue: Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology, Abrahama 58, hall 042

Minna Pirhonen is an Associate Professor and University Lecturer at the Department of Agricultural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland and a supervisor for Doctoral Programmes in Microbiology and Biotechnology and Plant Sciences at University of Helsinki.  Minna’s main research interest are connected to phytopathology, plant physiology, genetics and molecular microbiology.  She is an author and coauthor of more than fifty research and review publications targeting different aspects of interaction of plant pathogenic and plant associated bacteria with their plant hosts as well as isolation and characterization of soft rot bacteria.

Associate Professor Pirhonen was one of the first scientists (1993) to discover and describe that plant pathogenic bacteria communicate with each other in environment (the mechanism broadly known now as quorum sensing) and that they can globally coordinate their populational response during infection of the host. This fundamental work was a basis to understand that bacteria can be perceived as semi-multicellular organisms living under natural conditions in consortia and “talking to each other all the time”.