February 1, 2022: Merle Diekmann successfully defended her Master thesis: “Characterisation of putative Chitin Deacetylases in the Green Algae Chlorella variabilis”

Today, Merle Diekmann successfully defended her Master thesis which she had performed in continuation of one of our former European research projects, Nano3Bio. In this project, we had supported the Spanish company Greenaltech in screening microalgae for the production of chitin and chitosan. Derek Latil who had been involved in this project as an industrial doctoral researcher had identified several green algae as producers of chitin and, unexpectedly, also of chitosan. If verified, this would place green algae first on a list of non-fungal natural producers of chitosans. Derek had already performed a first chemical analysis of the material when he had come to us for a short research visit, and he had also identified an unusually large family of potential chitin deacetylase genes in the genome of one Chlorella strain. These were the starting points for Merle's project which she performed in contact with Derek, supervised in the lab by our doctoral researcher Martin Bonin and our post-doctoral researcher Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr. Merle carefully analyzed the genes initially annotated by Derek and identified the ones with the highest chances of really coding for chitin deacetylases. Some of these genes she cloned, a few she expressed heterologously to obtain recombinant protein, and one of these enzymes she verified indeed as a chitin deacetylase which she characterized in detail. The results of Merle's work all have publication quality, we are only still lacking a high-quality photograph of the algae stained with our artificial chitin- and chitosan-specific lectins. Now with her Master degree secured, Merle is planning to visit our collaborator Dr. Sebastian Hess in Cologne to perform this final task, in parallel to writing the manuscript for our planned publication