A strong appearance: one plenary lecture, four oral and one poster presentation on past and present work of our group at ICCC / SIAQ.

We were a strong and very visible delegation, six strong all told, at this year’s ICCC / SIAQ in Hermosillo in the North of Mexico. After the inaugural lecture given by Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher, two post-doctoral researchers from our group, Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr and Dr. Margareta Hellmann, gave oral presentations in the same session. Stefan reported on “our” still unique chitinosanase, the novel and precious chitosan hydrolyzing enzyme he structurally and functionally characterized together with his Master candidate Felizia Pöhlchen, and in collaboration with our French colleagues Prof. Gurvan Michel and Prof. Mirjam Czjzek in Roscoff as well as Prof. Sebastian Hess in Darmstadt. Margareta presented her recent results obtained in collaboration with Dr. Carolin Richter and Katharina Eickelpasch from our group on the structural and functional comparison of chitosans prepared either by heterogeneous deacetylation of chitin or by homogeneous N-acetylation of polyglucosamine, showing that they differ strongly – a new aspect of chitosans’ structure-function relationships. The next day saw Dr. Naivy Nava’s two oral presentations, one based on her doctoral work in our group on chitosan-induced resistance of tomato plants to root nematodes, and one on a chitosan-based plant strengthener developed at Brandon Bioscience in Ireland where she currently works. And the contributions by our two doctoral candidates, Katharina Eickelpasch and Sirikan Pongnan, deserve a separate NEWS entry. Our performance couldn’t have been stronger!