Catalina Feuli

Catalina Feuli is a PhD student in IBR-CONICET in Argentina. She has a solid background in molecular biology, genetics, biophysics, and microbiology. During her Master's program, she specialized in plant-pathogen interactions. In her PhD thesis, she works with an aqueous rosemary extract to investigate its protective effects on plants against pathogens, a topic which is part of CropPrime.

During her 6-month secondment at CPSBB, she focused on investigating the protective effects of rosemary extract against abiotic stress and elucidating its action mechanism using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism. To achieve this, she analyzed biochemical and physiological parameters, including photosynthetic efficiency, reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation, and membrane stability. She also intended to gather further insights using omics approaches, such as transcriptomics and metabolomics, to explore the complete genetic and metabolic networks involved in the priming effect. Additionally, she studied priming under stress conditions with a collection of Arabidopsis knockout mutants to identify the roles of key genes in the priming mechanism. The rosemary extract properties as a biostimulant were evaluated as well. In the second phase of the secondment, she assessed these biostimulant properties of the extract on crops such as raspberries and strawberries.