A new Dr. rer. nat.: Lea Hembach became Dr. Lea Hembach today

This Friday, Lea Hembach finally was officially awarded the title ‘Dr. rer. nat.’ Unfortunately, Corona still did not allow us to celebrate her in the Aula of the Schloss, so we could only join her after the ceremony for some cookies and sparkling wine in front of the institute. But Corona or not: Lea was baptised in the institute pond! – Lea had obtained her Master degree at the end of 2015 for a thesis she wrote in our group and during a research stay in Paris under the supervision of Prof. Chris Bowler. She had worked on a pair of fungal genes coding for a chitin synthase and a chitin deacetylase which she expressed heterologously in E. coli and in a diatom microalga. Based on this experience, she devised a highly demanding doctoral project on chitin synthase engineering which she pursued in the framework of our European Nano3Bio project. As this was a high risk / high gain project, she worked in parallel on fungal chitin deacetylases. When she finally had to abandon the synthase project as it simply did not want to work out, she had a sound basis on chitin deacetylases – and developed this in record time into a success story leading to two excellent publications: one on the enzymatic production of all fourteen possible chitosan tetramers published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, and a second one on a hitherto undescribed chitin deacetylase of the human pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans which she identified as the first ever chitosan deacetylase published in PNAS. Her work has already been taken up by Margareta Hellmann, and we are in the process of submitting a proposal for a collaborative research project with external partners to DFG. That’s a first in many years! Meanwhile, Lea became mother of Frida with the blue blue eyes, and we are looking forward to having her back for a few final months of postdoctoral work next year.