Lea Hembach successfully defended her PhD thesis

Today, Lea Hembach successfully defended her doctoral thesis, supported by her doctoral committee members Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher, Prof. Antoni Planas from Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, and Dr. Christian Gorzelanny from University Hospital Eppendorf in Hamburg. Part of the audience was present in the seminar room, half was joining online, thus giving her friends and family an opportunity to attend, too. Lea had started her doctoral research in the wake of the Nano3Bio project, initially aiming at engineering fungal chitin synthases. She had an ambitious plan and excellent ideas which she pursued with both persistence and creativity, but also with the courage to eventually abandon them when it became clear that in spite of so many efforts, it simply would not want to work out. She had, in parallel, continued work done during her Master thesis with us, namely on a presumed but disputed chitin deacetylase of the human pathogenic fungus Cryptococcus neoformans. This turned out to be an excellent decision. She was not only able to identify this enzyme as the first chitosan deacetylase, but she also developed a hypothesis for its physiological role during pathogenesis, based on experimental evidence she obtained in collaboration with Christian Gorzelanny – and published this work exceptionally well. Margareta Hellmann is planning to continue this research in her own doctoral project which she only just started, in a collaboration with Christian, the group of Prof. Alexander Weber in Tübingen, and the groups of Prof. Charles Specht in Worcester, Minnesota, and Prof. Jennifer Lodge in St. Louis, Missouri. And Lea also achieved the first ever biotechnological synthesis of all fourteen possible partially acetylated chitosan tetramers which she screened in a first bioassay, too – another project that opened up new opportunities which we are currently continuing to explore in our group. A true success story!