Jasper Wattjes successfully defended his PhD thesis

Today, Jasper Wattjes successfully defended his PhD thesis, supported by his first and second referees, Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher and Prof. Laurent David from the University of Lyon in France, respectively, and the third member of his doctoral committee, Prof. Francisco Goycoolea from the University of Leeds in the UK. Both written reports had been marked “summa cum laude”, and the third referee who was then selected by the Doctoral Board of the Faculty of Biology, Prof. Martin Peter from the University of Potsdam, one of the pioneers of chitosan chemistry, confirmed this grade - and Jasper successfully defended it! As a member of our funCHI project, he developed - together with Anna Niehues, Marina Vortmann from the F2F project, and our partner in both projects, Dr. Mareike Dirks-Hofmeister from the company Weiss BioTech, protocols to extract and analyse fungal chitin from spent fermentation mycelia. To this end, he was at the centre of the development of our enzymatic / mass spectrometric fingerprinting analyses, allowing determinations of the fraction and pattern of acetylation of chitosan polymers at unprecedented accuracy and speed, and with micro- instead of milligram amounts of sample. And in the context of our European Nano3Bio project, Jasper enzymatically produced and analysed the first “third generation” chitosan polymers with non-random patterns of acetylation, which are the subject of our most recent patent. He also tested their biodegradability and antimicrobial activity, and analysed their solution properties in collaboration with our partners and friends in Lyon and Copenhagen. Not surprisingly, then, his doctoral thesis comprises of six manuscripts, of which three are already published, one is (now) submitted for publication, and two will be submitted soon. He is also co-author on two other publications which he did not even include in his thesis. We are happy to know that Jasper will continue as a postdoc with us for a little longer.