News 2023

This year, for the first time, we did not celebrate our Christmas Party in the institute but instead, went out, to the newly opened brewery Finne.
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Today, as every year, Nicolaus came to our institute, and he seems to again appreciate our performance towards and beyond Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher’s retirement. Yes, we are getting fewer, but we are still strong!
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Today, we are extremely proud to have witnessed the central PhD award ceremony of the University of Münster during which our former doctoral and current post-doctoral researcher Margareta “Maggi” Hellmann received the Rectorate’s PhD Award 2025 of the University of Münster.
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For three weeks, our colleague Prof. Francisco Goycoolea has been visiting us to continue our collaborative project in the framework of the DFG Priority Programme “Codeχ – The Code of Chito-Protein Interactions”.
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Today, Lea Theile - one of our last (but not yet the last) Master candidates successfully defended her MSc thesis in front of our still not so small research group, and supported by her two “opponents”, her formal supervisor Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher as well as her second reviewer, Prof. Maik Böhmer from the University of Frankfurt.
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We were a strong and very visible delegation, six strong all told, at this year’s ICCC / SIAQ in Hermosillo in the North of Mexico. After the inaugural lecture given by Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher, two post-doctoral researchers from our group, Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr and Dr. Margareta Hellmann, gave oral presentations in the same session.
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As important as talks are posters at any scientific conference. The huge advantage of poster over oral presentations is that the people who performed the work are actually presenting it themselves – while oral presentations are all too often given by the professors who supervised, but did not carry out the work and, thus, are often ignorant of the details.
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After the Asia-Pacific Chitin and Chitosan Symposium APCCS in Taiwan just two months ago, last month’s International Conference on Chitin and Chitosan ICCC, co-organized with the conference of the Iberoamerican Chitosan Society SIAQ, in Mexico was the second important conference for our research topic this year.
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Dr. Naivy Nava visits us for a short research stay in our group during which she intends to follow-up on her doctoral project on developing chitosans as a plant biopesticide protecting plants from soil-born nematodes.
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Today, our secretary-and-foreign-language-correspondent-turned-project-manager Cordula Kurth was awarded the certificate for the successful completion of her studies so that now, she also formally has the qualifications of a business administrator. We are not surprised.
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Today, Dr. Margareta Hellmann’s and Katharina Eickelpasch’s paper has been accepted for publication in the renowned journal Carbohydrate Polymers. Together with Dr. Carolin Richter, who also serves as senior and corresponding author for the paper, they had selected pairs of chitosans with similar degrees of polymerization and fractions of acetylation, but different patterns of acetylation, random or regular.
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Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr, supported by Dr. Margareta Hellmann, has again come up with a new method for chitosan analysis which has just been accepted for publication in the renowned journal Carbohydrate Polymers.
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As in other fields, too, the Corona pandemic led to a gap in the three regular international chitin and chitosan conferences, EUCHIS, SIAQ, and APCCS.
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There are three regular international meetings of the chitin and chitosan scientific community: the biannual meetings of the European Chitin Society EUCHIS and of the Ibero-American Chitin and Chitosan Society SIAQ, as well as the Asia-Pacific Chitin and Chitosan Symposium APCCS organized by East- and South-East-Asian societies in turn.
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Today, Carlos Girão’s first paper containing results from his sandwich doctoral year with us in Münster has been accepted for publication in the journal Biocatalysis and Agricultural Biotechnology.
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After almost 30 years, today was Bruno’s last day as a regular professor at the university of Münster, but he was appointed senior professor for one more year.
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“Start-up Contacts” is organized by the “Venture Club Münster”, a large local student-initiative for start-ups and innovation organizing this annual fair since 2023 under the motto “Vision Becomes Venture”.
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The “MS-Wissenschaft” is a ormer freight ship turned into an exhibition ship for science, particularly addressing the pupils and non-expert interested visitors.
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This week, Prof. Moerschbacher was invited again to give a general lecture on “Chitins and Chitosans – Analysis and Applications” at the famous European Glycosciences Summer School which was organized this year in Groningen, the Netherlands.
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From May 12-14, Margareta Hellmann visited the first "INSECTSplus" conference, jointly organized by the German Institute of Food Technologies (DIL) and the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy (ATB). 
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Today, Margareta “Maggi” Hellmann finalized her doctoral voyage with presenting it in three minutes to her guests and those of her twelve fellow doctoral candidates. Not an easy task given that her thesis contained nine manuscripts on almost 400 pages.
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Today, after a long time, another young researcher from our group received her doctoral degree: along with 15 other young Doctors, Mounashree Student took the oath, pledging to “strive at all times to preserve the doctoral title from every blemish, prove herself worthy of this title in all future academic endeavours, and to always seek and uphold academic truth to the best of her knowledge and belief”.
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Today, Sirikan ‘Gundum’ Pongnan, a doctoral candidate from the Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology (VISTEC) in Pa Yup Nai, Thailand, presented her project for her sandwich year in our research group.
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Today, a paper by Prof. Jogi Madhuprakash from the University of Hyderabad, to which Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr from our group contributed his analytical expertise, has been accepted for publication in the renowned journal “Carbohydrate Polymers”.
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Today, Margareta Hellmann successfully defended her doctoral thesis on the “Influence of cell wall modification by chitin deacetylases in Cryptococcus neoformans on the human immune response” in front of her doctoral committee, Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher, PD Christian Gorzelanny from the Institute of Dermatology and Venerology of the University Hospital Eppendorf in Hamburg, and Prof. Alexander Weber from the Institute of Immunology at the University of Tübingen.
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At the beginning of this week, this year’s annual retreat of the DFG Priority Programme on Chitin, Chitosan and Chito-Oligosaccharides and Their Interactions with Proteins of the Extracellular Matrix and Cellular Signaling – CodeX – was held in Münster.
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Today, another manuscript that has been really long in the making has been accepted for publication in the renowned International Journal of Biological Macromolecules.
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Today, another of the manuscripts in Margareta Hellmann’s doctoral thesis has been accepted for publication in the renowned journal Frontiers in Immunology.
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Today, Mounashree Student defended her doctoral thesis entitled “Ustilago maydis chitin deacetylases – A story of specificity and redundancy” supported by her ‘Doktorvater’ Bruno Moerschbacher and the two other members of her doctoral committee, Prof. Volha Shapaval from Norway and Prof. Jenny Lodge from the US. Prof.
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Today, the first paper originating from Katharina Ost’s doctoral project on engineering the fungus Aspergillus niger for optimized protein production has been accepted for publication in the renowned journal The Cell Surface.
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And again! Yet another of Margareta Hellmann’s manuscripts has been accepted for publication today, in the journal SoftwareX.
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Today, another of the manuscripts which are part of Margareta Hellmann’s doctoral thesis has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules.
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