News

Misha Hegde and Mia Maurer, two students in the 10th and 11th grades at the comprehensive school Schuldorf in Seeheim-Jugenheim near Darmstadt were awarded first prize in the "Jugend forscht" competition in May of this year for their project on the search for a biological method to combat Rhizobium rhizogenes. Rhizobium rhizogenes is a bacterium that causes a plant disease which can – due to uninhibited root growth – lead to the death of affected crops and thus to crop losses.

A year after launching their "Jugend forscht"-project, the breakthrough came when the two students searched through compost in a neighbor's garden. "One gram of soil contains over a million phages," explains Katharina Höfer, LOEWE Top Professor and scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biology (MPI-TM) and the University of Marburg, who invited the two young women to Marburg. Finding the right "needle" for combating bacteria in this "haystack" was a real challenge.

And Mia and Misha from Seeheim-Jugenheim passed with flying colors. They were even able to examine "their" phage under an electron microscope at the University of Heidelberg. Proud of their discovery, they named the completely new phage species "Mi-Rila." The letters "Mi" stand for their two first names. "Rila" stands for "rhizogenes infecting lytic agent," meaning the phage specifically kills a rhizogenes bacterium.

They found that the phage actually only attacks the bacterium responsible for the root disease, without affecting other beneficial microorganisms. In the long term, their approach could represent an environmentally friendly alternative to antibiotics in agriculture.

"This is unique and outstanding," the professor said of the discovery made by the two 15-year-olds. She expressed particular respect for how Mia Maurer and Misha Hegde combined various research methods and the persistence with which they pursued their project. "They truely understood molecular biology and microbiology. They also saw the social benefits of their research and felt a real spirit of discovery," Höfer said in an interview with the newspaper "Oberhessische Presse" in Marburg.

"It's very important to show that you can be successful in science at such a young age," says the professor, delighted with the success and curiosity of the two 15-year-olds. "It's already fun working with them," she says. And perhaps in a few years, the two will even pursue careers as researchers.

Link to the press release of Marburg University: https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/aktuelles/news/2025/jugendforschtanuni-1