Paper accepted: “Expression of Bacillus licheniformis chitin deacetylase in E. coli pLysS: Sustainable production, purification, and characterization”

Today, the manuscript of our former postdoctoral researchers Ritu and Keyur Raval in collaboration with Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr from our group has been accepted for publication in the reputed “International Journal of Biological Macromolecules”. Ritu had been our first Indian postdoc, back in 2006-2008, and her husband Keyur joint our group for a short time after obtaining his PhD from the RWTH Aachen. After returning back to India with their daughter Amee, they both ended up securing professorships in Mangaluru, in the South-West Indian state of Karnataka, Ritu at Manipal Institute of Technology and Keyur at National Institute of Technology Karnataka. We are collaborating with them for the characterization of bacterial chitin deacetylases. We had provided them with a plasmid containing the gene for a Bacillus licheniformis chitin deacetylase which Dr. Stephan Kolkenbrock had initially isolated, expressed and characterized when he was a postdoc in our group. Ritu and Keyur succeeded in greatly increasing the yield of recombinant enzyme when expressing it in E. coli, and Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr characterized its regio-selectivity in our lab. The next step will be to purify sufficient amounts of protein for crystallography which we plan to perform in collaboration with Prof. Mirjam Czjzek in Roscoff, France. We are confident that this first joint paper of our groups will help Ritu to succeed in winning funds for a sabbatical stay in our group in the near future.