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Dr. Maximilian Sack

DigitalPROTECT ist an EU-funded project with the goal of developing methods of identifying RNA-actives for RNA-based plant protection. It is a joint project between the Bioinformatics Group at the Institute of Computer Science and the Mikrobielle Biotechnologie Group at the Institut für Biochemie & Biotechnologie.

Recent studies on using small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to protect crop plants against viral infections have shown success (Knoblich, 2025; Gago-Zachert, 2019). These studies employed elaborate screens to identify effective siRNAs (esiRNAs) targeting viral RNA, which were then combined in double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) that can be processed by Dicer-like (DCL) enzymes into siRNAs. This processing should favour the esiRNAs over other siRNAs and ‘effective’ dsRNAs (edsRNAs) are specifically designed to facilitate this.

The applied methods rely on the evaluation of short read sequencing data from siRNA pools and require evaluation by specialised bioinformaticians, as well as manual curation of the results. Due to the use of several different programs and pipelines, these evaluations are not standardized and hard to compare.

One goal of the project is to create a user-friendly, GUI-based tool that can perform these analyses and provide tailored visualisations.

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