Paper published: “Heterogeneously deacetylated chitosans possess an unexpected regular pattern favoring acetylation at every third position”

Today, Margareta Hellmann’s paper describing her surprising observation of an unexpectedly regular distribution of acetyl groups in typical commercial chitosans was accepted for publication in the renowned journal “Nature Communications”. This paper resolves a decade-old debate between chitosanologists, prominently debated during a Chitin & Chitosan conference in 2017. Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher had started his talk stating that all chitosans commercially available have random patterns of acetylation, while only our biotechnologically produced ones have a block-wise distribution of acetyl groups. Only minutes later, Dr. Mats Andersson claimed that all chitosans commercially available have block-wise patterns of acetylation, while only his homogeneously produced ones have a random distribution of acetyl groups. Mats and Bruno then decided that we would try to resolve this question by using our new analytical tools to compare our biotech chitosans, Mats’ homogeneously and commercial heterogeneously produced chitosans, and chemically produced ones. Alas, Margareta and Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr, her direct supervisor and senior author of the publication, proved both of us wrong! While it is true that our biotech chitosans have block-patterns and Mats’ chitosans have random patterns, the commercial ones have neither block- nor random patterns - instead, their pattern is more regular! And this insight will have consequences for all potential applications, from agriculture to biomedicine and pharma, from cosmetics to food and material sciences.