Visitors from Thailand: Prof. Albert Schulte and Prof. Wipa Suginta, the supervisors of our sandwich doctoral candidate Sirikan Pongnan, visited us.

Today, two colleagues from the renowned Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology VISTEC in Rayong, Thailand, visited our institute to meet with their doctoral candidate Sirikan “Gundum” Pongnan whose sandwich year in Münster is coming to an end. Prof. Wipa Suginta, Gundum’s principal supervisor, is an expert on chitin degradation by marine Vibrio bacteria, and she collaborates with Prof. Albert Schulte, the director of the School of Biomolecular Science and Engineering at VISTEC in the development of chitosan-based biosensors. Supported by Prof. Tamo Fukamizo, world-expert on chitosan degrading enzymes and the bioactivity of their products and regular visiting professor at VISTEC, and a past visiting professor at our institute, they supported Gundum to spend her mandatory sandwich doctoral year in our group in Münster. She had brought with her the wildtype and two muteins of a Vibrio chitin deacetylase which she had already characterized structurally in Thailand and which she functionally characterized in Münster, supported by Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr and his unique expertise in chitosan mass spectrometry, as well as Dr. Margareta Hellmann and her expertise in chitosan enzymology, including molecular modelling. Gundum was so efficient that in spite of initial problems, she ended up not only finalizing her planned research program, but in addition producing two more muteins of the same enzyme and beginning to characterize them. Her Thai supervisors were as impressed as we are! Gundum, thank you for an efficient and successful year as a productive and cherished member of our team in Münster!