A guest from Thailand: Welcome Sirikan Pongnan presented her planned work for her doctoral sandwich stay in our group

Today, Sirikan ‘Gundum’ Pongnan, a doctoral candidate from the Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology (VISTEC) in Pa Yup Nai, Thailand, presented her project for her sandwich year in our research group. She joined our team at the beginning of March and started to work in the lab right away, supported by our youngest post-doc, Dr. Margareta Hellmann. At home, Gundum works in the group of Prof. Wipa Suginta at the School of Biomolecular Science and Engineering (BSE) who is studying chitin metabolization in the oceans by Vibrio bacteria. These bacteria produce an elaborate set of enzymes for chitin degradation, among them chitin oligomer deacetylases. Gundum has already performed a comprehensive in silico analysis of these enzymes from a range of Vibrio species and based on these studies, has designed a mutational strategy to investigate structure-function relationships of these enzymes. Since 2023, Prof. Tamo Fukamizo – one of the global pioneers of chitosanase research who had visited us for a short research stay in Münster at the end of 2018 – is Teaching Professor at the same institute in Thailand, and he mediated the contact with our group. In Münster, Gundum will attempt to use enzyme engineering for the generation of novel deacetylase variants that perform the task of deacetylation more efficiently than the native forms. Gundum, we are very happy to have you here with us, and we are looking forward to an exciting collaborative project.