Laboratory for plant analytics

We conduct numerous laboratory practicals for Bachelor's and Master's students in the field of renewable resources. In addition, we supervise students in the practical phase and in final theses during experimental work in the laboratory.

These are in particular:

• Botanical Internship – The students carry out microscopic examinations of plant anatomy and morphology and learn the technique of thin-layer chromatography for the examination of plant pigments.
• Internship related to plant constituents – The focus here is on getting to know analytical methods for the quantitative and qualitative determination of plant constituents. Here we work with classical wet-chemical, chromatographic and infrared spectroscopic methods.
• Internship related to plant biotechnology - Here the students learn a variety of molecular biological techniques in the laboratory and practise the establishment and cultivation of plant in vitro cultures under the sterile workbench.
• Internship related to ingredients of medicinal and dyeing plants – essential contents are the analysis of secondary plant substances, the preparation and evaluation of aromatograms, the distillative extraction of essential oils and hydrolates as well as the preparation and testing of own formulations.

Our research focuses on the development of infrared spectroscopic methods for the prediction of value-giving ingredients in various matrices (vegetable oils, vegetable oil fuels, honey, wood pellets, plant fibres, plant drugs, etc.), the development of molecular biological methods for genotype differentiation (nettle, chestnut, etc.) with various marker techniques (RAPD, CAPS, ISSR, etc.) as well as methods for in vitro propagation of various cultivated plants (callus cultures, somatic embryogenesis, protoplast culture, etc.). In addition, we conduct batch experiments to determine the methane formation potential of various biogas substrates in our laboratory.