David Gercke successfully defended his MSc thesis

Today, David Gercke successfully defended his MSc thesis on the molecular characterization of “our” Bacillus chitosanase BspCSN-MN, supported by Bruno Moerschbacher and the second referee, Prof. Joachim José from the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy. Using rational protein design, and supervised by Eva Regel and Ratna Singh, David had engineered muteins of this enzyme which are incapable of hydrolyzing glucosamine tetramers, thus leading to larger oligomeric products when acting on partially acetylated chitosan polymers. At the same time, he found that some of his muteins are producing chitosan oligomers with different patterns of acetylation compared to the wildtype enzyme. These muteins, thus, give access to interesting oligomers with a high potential for new bioactivities. As a side-project, David also investigated two chitosanases from a nematophagous fungus, thus initiating a collaboration with Prof. Lopez-Llorca from the University of Alicante in Spain with whom Naivy Nava plans to investigate chitosan-based strategies to protect plants from pathogenic nematodes, together with Prof. Johannes Hallmann from the Julius Kühn-Institute here in Münster. While searching for new challenges in the real world after the end of his studies, David will support us a little longer, also finalizing his manuscript to be submitted for publication.