October 16, 2023: REACH Thesis Award: Vera Fleuter was honoured for one of the two most innovative Master theses of the past year

Today, during the Science to Start-up Convention S2SC of the REACH Euregio Start-up Center, Vera Fleuter obtained the REACH thesis award for her Master thesis on “Insect waste as a new source of chitosan – Production, scale-up and characterization of a sustainable biostimulant”. She had been supervised by our doctoral researcher Margareta Hellmann and supported by Prof. Samir Salameh from the FH in Steinfurt while developing and scaling up the production process of chitosan from different insect wastes, and by Dr. Rebecca Melcher from the company Bex-Biotec in Bönen where she performed the biostimulant trials on crop plants. Against many odds, she succeeded in preparing an insect chitosan sample which is structurally and functionally equivalent to one of the shrimp chitosan samples which we have optimised during the past two decades for antimicrobial and phytostimulatory activities. This process is now already the basis for a small EU-supported research project which we are pursuing in collaboration with an insect farmer and two large vegetable farmers, coordinated by “Netzwerk Ackerbau Niedersachsen”. One of the goals of this project is the foundation of a new start-up company based on this process. This is already the second time that one of our team members obtained the REACH thesis award – after Dr. Naivy Nava who received this award for her doctoral thesis during which she had optimized a shrimp chitosan for the protection of plants against pathogenic nematodes. Our new insect chitosan is designed after this shrimp chitosan – how perfectly fitting!