Martin Bonin successfully defended his MSc thesis

Today, Martin Bonin successfully defended his MSc thesis on characterization and engineering of two fungal chitin deacetylases, supported by Bruno Moerschbacher and the second referee, Prof. Dirk Prüfer from our institute. Regio-selective chitin deacetylases are precious tools for us to produce fully defined chitosan oligomers with known architecture which we can then test for their bioactivities. This allows a truly molecular understanding of structure-function relationships of partially acetylated chitosans, and of their cellular modes of action. However, these enzymes are difficult to express heterologously. Supervised by Lea Hembach and Stefan Cord-Landwehr, Martin characterized the regio-selectivity of a new chitin deacetylase, and together with Michael Liss from the company Thermo Fisher, he designed a site saturation mutagenesis library for a different chitin deacetylase in which he replaced, one by one, 27 selected amino acids around the active site of the enzyme by all other possible amino acids. He then screened this library in the group of Prof. Toni Planas from the Institut Quimic de Sarria at Ramon Llull University in Barcelona - one of the partners in our Nano3Bio project - for changed activities towards different substrates. The interesting results he got will keep us - and possibly him - busy for some time to come.