Paper accepted: “Chitosan analysis by enzymatic / mass spectrometric fingerprinting and in silico predictive modeling”

Today, Anna’s, Jasper’s, and their co-authors first paper on chitosan fingerprinting has been accepted for publication in “Analytical Chemistry”. I think it was in St Petersburg during the Euchis meeting in 2011 that in the final slide of my presentation, I suggested - half jokingly - to use our chitinosanase (the new chitosan hydrolase we finally succeeded in publishing earlier this year) followed by mass spectrometric analysis of the products to determine the degree of acetylation of chitosans. We had preliminary evidence that it should work, but the technique seemed much too arcane to ever be used. Well, things have changed. We love to work on microgram samples nowadays, we have since tremendously improved mass spectrometric chitosan oligomer analysis (also published earlier this year), and we have now developed sophisticated statistical methods to analyse the data obtained. We know this paper will mark a breakthrough for chitosan polymer analysis because it is only the first one in what we are sure will be a small series of excellent papers describing different enzymatic / mass spectrometric fingerprinting techniques to analyse various characteristics of chitosans, not only their degree of acetylation. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves - you will see it in time!