16th ICCC / 9th SIAQ in Hermosillo, Mexico: Second stop on Bruno Moerschbacher’s fare-well tour to international chitin & chitosan conferences.

After the Asia-Pacific Chitin and Chitosan Symposium APCCS in Taiwan just two months ago, last month’s International Conference on Chitin and Chitosan ICCC, co-organized with the conference of the Iberoamerican Chitosan Society SIAQ, in Mexico was the second important conference for our research topic this year. Thus, it also was the second stop on Bruno’s fare-well tour around the globe, allowing him to meet with colleagues and friends from the New World. He had the honor of being invited to give the inaugural lecture, and he had been encouraged to attempt an overview over the almost 40 years of research into chitosan of his team – or, rather, teams as they evolved over time. He had a full 40 minutes for the task, rather a lot even for a plenary lecture, but that still required careful and painful selection. Too many aspects had to be left out – small wonder given that our team has produced roughly 80 SII/BSc theses, 120 Dipl/MSc theses, and 90 Dr/PhD theses in 40 years, most of them related to chitosans. The key message was that the development of ever more sensitive methods for structural and functional analyses has driven the development of ever more reproducible, quality-controlled production processes for ever better defined chitosans as a basis for the development of ever more reliable chitosan-based products – such as the ones offered by our start-ups! Bruno emphasized that excellent results can only be obtained with excellent ingredients – as any chef in a top restaurant and any ambitious cook at home will agree. And that not only refers to the chitosans used, but – much more importantly – to the members of the research team involved!