Lisanne Hameleers successfully defended her MSc thesis

Today, Lisanne Hameleers successfully defended her MSc thesis on enzymes involved in the modification of fungal cell walls during growth, supported by Bruno Moerschbacher and her second referee, Prof. Arthur Ram from Leiden University where Lisanne also spent some time during her Master thesis. Lisanne’s work was part of the funCHI project supported by the European Research Area - Industrial Biotechnology programme, in which Prof. Ram’s group in the Netherlands also is a partner. Lisanne’s initial focus was on transglycosylating enzymes which are believed to be involved in forming the covalent cross links between chitin and glucans in the fungal cell wall. These enzymes are little studied so far, except for those in baker’s yeast, but Prof. Ram’s group had found a much larger gene family in the filamentous fungus Aspergillus niger. Lisanne managed to heterologously express most of them in E. coli and in Pichia pastoris, and to analyse their enzymatic activity. This proved a lot more challenging than expected, but she finally succeeded! Perhaps induced by the initially frustrating work on these enzymes, Lisanne also started to work on a chitin deacetylase of this fungus, and she was quickly successful, expressing the gene in E. coli and characterising the recombinant protein which again differs in its product spectrum from the chitin deacetylases we already characterised lately. In Leiden, she then complemented this work by performing in vivo studies, by knocking out and overexpressing the gene in A. niger. With her work, Lisanne laid the foundation for two excellent publications for which she will try to perform the finishing touches during the coming few months when she will still continue to work with us. Thanks, Lisanne, for your excellent work!