Anna Niehues successfully defended her PhD thesis

This afternoon, Anna Niehues successfully defended her PhD thesis, supported by her first and second referees, Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher and Prof. Henk Schols from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, respectively, and the third member of her doctoral committee, Dr. Pierre Alexandre Driguez from the company Sanofi-Pasteur in Paris, France. Her thesis - comprising eight manuscripts of which five are already published, one is (by now) submitted and two, which are also subject of a highly promising patent, will be submitted shortly - was rated “summa cum laude” by both referees. Prof. M.A.K. Williams from Massey University of New Zealand, a world-renowned pectin researcher who was asked for a third, independent review by the Doctoral Board of the Faculty of Biology, confirmed this “summa”, and Anna also successfully defended it today! As a member of our funCHI project, she developed - together with Jasper Wattjes and supported by Marina Vortmann from the related F2F project - protocols for the isolation and characterisation of fungal chitin from the cell walls of spent fermentation mycelia provided by Dr. Mareike Dirks-Hofmeister from the industrial partner of both projects, Weiss BioTech. In this context, Anna has been central in developing our new enzymatic / mass spectrometric fingerprinting analysis tools for partially acetylated chitosan oligomers and polymers which allow accurate determination of the fraction and patterns of acetylation on minute amounts of sample in a medium throughput style, as well as reverse fingerprinting techniques to characterise chitosan-hydrolysing enzymes concerning their subsite specificities and preferences. Anna’s mathematical mind-set and her advanced computer skills allowed her to automate our data analysis of mass spectrograms, but also to perform complex multivariate statistical analyses of the huge data sets which only allowed us to make real sense of the results - a crucial contribution to our European Nano3Bio project. Finally, her in silico modelling skills are giving us ever deeper insight into the molecular mode of action of our chitinases, chitin deacetylases, chitosanases, and new chitinosanase. We are happy that Anna will continue for a little longer as a postdoc in our group.