Carbohydrate Bioengineering Meeting CBM14: Bruno Moerschbacher gave an invited talk on “Enzymatic Bioengineering of Chitosans with Non-Random Patterns of Acetylation”

The Carbohydrate Bioengineering Meeting held every other year is one of the most relevant international meetings in our research area. However, it is usually organized almost concomitantly with the biannual Conference of the European Chitin Society EUCHIS which is even more relevant to us. Therefore, we have too often missed CBM in the past. Both meetings would have been due this year, but both needed to be postponed to next year. As a replacement to fill the communication gap, EUCHIS started a monthly webinar series on chitin and chitosans recently which was opened with a short research presentation of Bruno Moerschbacher as the current president of EUCHIS. CBM instead organized a digital interim conference on May 31 and June 1, with four invited speakers each. On the second day, squeezed in between three talks on lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases (LPMO), Bruno gave an extended version of his presentation, highlighting the advances of the past twenty years on our way from poorly characterized first generation chitosan of the past to today’s second generation chitosans which are well defined in terms of their degrees of polymerization and acetylation, focusing his presentation mostly on our recent and current work on controlling also the pattern of acetylation of partially acetylated chitosan oligomers and polymers, leading the way to tomorrow’s third generation chitosans. A little over one hundred participants followed the talks which will shortly be visible on the CBM14 website, too. Then next spring, we will hopefully have an opportunity to also discuss them in person, in Norefjell, close to Oslo.