Welcome Dr. Dana Byrtusova, who joins our team for two months as a guest researcher in the framework of the BYPROVALUE project

Today, Dr. Dana Byrtusova from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) in Aas joined us for a two-month research stay in Münster. In this project, our Norwegian partners are growing zygomycetes fungi on different waste streams, in order to biotechnologically valorize them by the production of lipids and chitins or chitosans. We are involved in the quantification of the chitin and chitosan content of the cell walls as well as in their extraction and characterisation. Dana has brought samples from different fungal strains grown in different media under different conditions for different periods of time. The samples have already been analysed in Norway using FTIR so that we have a rough idea on what to expect. With the help of Mouna and Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr, Dana will now analyse these mycelia using Mouna’s new enzymatic mass spectrometric method for the quantification and characterisation of chitins and chitosans in complex matrices. Once we identify the best conditions, we can get more biomass from Norway, and we can also produce it ourselves as Dana has brought the fungal strains. This should allow us to purify the chitins and chitosans to perform a more in depth structural, and then also functional, analysis. Too little is known so far on the structure and function of native chitosans. Using our new and more sophisticated analytical tools, we are confident that our project will break new ground in this exciting are of chitosan research.