Paper accepted: “Identification of a novel chitinase from Aeromonas hydrophila AH-1N for the degradation of chitin within fungal mycelium”

Today, the first shared-first-authorship paper of Marina Vortmann from our group and Anna Stumpf from Prof. Philipp’s group in Microbiology was accepted for publication in the journal “FEMS Microbiology Letters”. This is a result of our joint F2F project in which also Dr. Mareike Dirks-Hofmeister from the company Weiss BioTech - also a co-author on our paper - as well as Prof. Wendisch’s group from Bielefeld University and the company Cysal are involved. The goal of our project is the development of a bacterial consortium able to utilize the left-over mycelium of industrial fermentations of e.g. Aspergillus niger for the production of fine chemicals. One partner of the bacterial consortium, the “degrader”, will degrade the fungal cell wall, and the other partner, the “producer”, will use the chitin degradation products for the synthesis of e.g. amino acids or dipeptides. In the current paper, we describe the isolation of an Aeromonas hydrophila strain from the local Aasee in Münster which has the ability to grow on the fungal fermentation mycelium supplied by Weiss BioTech. We have characterized in detail a chitinase of this bacterium, which is probably one of the most important chitin destruents in fresh water, and another paper will follow soon in which we will describe further components of its chitinolytic machinery.