Review accepted: “Cell walls of filamentous fungi – Challenges and opportunities for biotechnology”

Today, Katharina Ost’s review on the biotechnology of fungal cell walls was accepted for publication in the journal Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology. Kathy is working for her doctoral project on strain development to improve the fungus Aspergillus niger for biotechnological protein production in the group of Prof. Mareike Dirks-Hofmeister in Osnabrück. Kathy and Mareike were invited to contribute this review upon recommendation by Prof. Ursula Kües, who had listened to Kathy presenting her results at the Fungal Genetics Conference in California last year. They in turn invited Kathy’s doctoral committee members Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher and Prof. Arthur Ram from Leiden University, who then invited some of their team members to support the writing of this review. Together, we defined the scope of the review, but Kathy and Mareike ended up doing most of the work, meticulously collecting data and screening the literature for work related to the impact of cell walls, positive as well as negative, on fungal biotechnology. From our group, Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr and Dr. Mounashree Student mostly contributed to the chapter on fungal chitins and chitosans as functional biopolymers. We feel that this review covers an important and timely subject which has not received sufficient attention in the past, and we are looking forward to its reception by mycologists and biotechnologists.