Vera Fleuter successfully defended her Master thesis: “Insect waste as a new source of chitosan – Production, scale-up and characterization of a sustainable biostimulant”

Today, Vera Fleuter successfully defended her Master thesis on the production and agricultural use of an insect-derived chitosan which she had performed partly in our group and partly in the labs of Bex-Biotec, the biotech start-up of our alumna Dr. Rebecca Melcher. We have long been interested in chitosans derived from alternative sources rather than from shrimp and crab shells, out of curiosity, but also because demands for high-quality, second generation chitosans are continuously increasing, threatening to make the traditional source less sustainable. Fungal cell walls are an obvious option, and we are pursuing this since quite a while, e.g. in our ongoing Norwegian-German project LignoLIPP. Insects are another much discussed possibility, particularly now that insect farms are growing all over Europe as an alternative protein source for animal feed. However, insect chitosan samples we received from different companies trying to establish a commercial process for its production were invariably of low quality. So we finally teamed up with one of the pioneers in insect farming in Europe to establish our own process, and this task was taken over by Vera, supported by our doctoral researcher Margareta Hellmann. Together, they developed a process to extract chitin and convert it into a chitosan that is structurally and, at least under laboratory conditions, functionally equivalent to a shrimp chitosan we have developed over the years in collaboration with Dr. Dominique Gillet from the French company Gillet chitosan and which is giving us excellent results as an agrobiologic, protecting plants from pests and pathogens as well as from different abiotic stress conditions. This could be – will be! – the beginning of a new success story of our group.