December 7, 2023: joint Christmas party: The Ischebeck and Moerschbacher teams celebrated together

This year, we celebrated our Christmas party together with the group of Prof. Till Ischebeck, the designated successor of Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher. We also had a mixed orga team, and they did a great job! Food and Glühwein, Wichteln and Pub-Quiz were superb – we also deserved it after another highly successful year! We had again four excellent Bachelor students, Carolin Kappelhoff, Pia Koenig, Leon Götzmann, and Nils Goldbach. Nils continued supporting us as a student aid, together with our experienced students Lara Lüneberg, Antonia Irion, Evelyn Tchoub, and Florian Teutemacher. Juli Scharffe and Felizia Pöhlchen started their Master projects; Vera Fleuter and Julia Zalder successfully defended theirs. Vera obtained the REACH Thesis Award for her work, Julia continued as a post-graduate researcher for a while, and she is now on a three-month research visit in Brazil, where she is supporting our collaboration with our alumna Prof. Roberta Paulert at the University of Paraná. Similarly, our last year's Master students Sonja Raetz, Denis Qoraj, Judith Ryll and Anika Jürß continued their projects for a few months until they found their next challenge; Sonja and Denis in doctoral projects elsewhere, Judith in founding her own start-up company independent of us, and Anika taking over responsibility for our new European EIP-Agri project AbDü on insects as an alternative source for chitin and chitosan. Mounashree Urs, after a short maternity leave, and Margareta Hellmann are in the final phases of their doctoral projects; Ekaterina Gubaeva re-joined us for final experiments towards her doctoral degree after a prolonged family leave for her three daughters; and Katharina Eickelpasch started her doctoral project in the framework of the new priority program Codeχ. Our alumnae Dr. Naivy Nava and Dr. Soofia Khanahmadi continued working on manuscripts resulting from their doctoral and post-doctoral projects with us; Naivy finalised the Algen-KI project, supported by the bioinformatic skills of Judith; Soofia recently returned from Canada to start working in the Codeχ project of our partner Prof. Maik Böhmer at the University of Frankfurt. Our sub-group leaders Dr. Carolin Richter, Dr. Ratna Singh, and Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr continued supervising all of our activities, supported by our post-doctoral researcher Dr. Vânia Horta de Passo. Caro keeps working for her planned start-up greEnCAP, together with Dr. Sruthi Sreekumar; they were selected for this year's RootCamp Accelerator, and they succeeded in winning continuing financial support for their plans in the form of the Lab2Field NRW Patent Validation grant. Ratna successfully completed her Indo-German Bioeconomy International BMBF project Bio-Fun and continues to offer her broad expertise in bioinformatics, which is in great demand in both Academia and Industry. Stefan continued offering his analytical expertise via our Service Unit ChitoProf, serving an increasing, global demand; together with Caro, he performed the last experiments of our German-Norwegian Bioeconomy-in-the-North BMBF project LignoLIPP and in the parallel NRC project BYPROVALUE; and he now took over responsibility for our new Codeχ DFG project ChitoCode. Vânia is currently on family leave but plans to continue her phytopathology research with us in February. Our alumna Dr. Anne Vortkamp and our alumnus Dr. Philipp Lemke were successful in winning an NRW start-up grant to support their planned start-up AgriBluBio, so both will re-join us in Januaryy. DFG finally granted our new DFG project Cryptococcus, together with our colleague and alumnus Dr. Christian Gorzelanny in Hamburg, which Margareta master-minded to continue her work on the role of chitin deacetylases and chitosans in this human pathogenic fungus. Finally, all of this was held together by our tried-and-trusted research assistant Sabrina Stritzel who has her eyes and hands everywhere to support everyone, alone now that Christin Meier has left us for a trip around the world. And nothing – nothing would work without the technical support by Peter Liesker; and even less without the management skills of Cordula Kurth. What a long NEWS. Seems like it is not so easy to wind down our activities.