Codeχ annual retreat: The members of the DFG Priority Programme on the Code of Chito-Protein Interactions met with their guests in Münster

At the beginning of this week, this year’s annual retreat of the DFG Priority Programme on Chitin, Chitosan and Chito-Oligosaccharides and Their Interactions with Proteins of the Extracellular Matrix and Cellular Signaling – CodeX – was held in Münster. About sixty CodeX members and a few guests working on chitin- and chitosan-related projects outside of the CodeX consortium convened to report on the progress of their projects and the plans for future work. Most important was the direct and intense exchange between the doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, to make the experience and infrastructure of all Codeχ partners available to all CodeX and CodeX-related projects. This exchange was facilitated by the fact that we know each other already from last year’s retreat and summer school. We also had invited two key note speakers, Prof. Stefan Linder from the Eppendorf University Hospital in Hamburg who reported on “Intracellular Trafficking of Lytic Enzymes in Human Macrophages” and Prof. Francisco Goycoolea from the University of Murcia in Spain who described the ideas for his project as a CodeX-Mercator fellow, on “Decoding Chitosans-Mucin Interactions”, in collaboration with several CodeX partners. The mood was excellent, and so was the science presented. We are already looking forward to this year’s summer school, to be organised in Düsseldorf on the subject of in silico modelling of chito-protein interactions.