First EUCHIS webinars on Chitin and Chitosans: Patterns of Acetylation and 3D Printing

Today at 11 am, the European Chitin Society EUCHIS launched its first Chitin & Chitosans webinar, in an attempt to close the communication gap between EUCHIS conferences caused by the pandemic. Our last meeting has been in Seville in 2017, the next one had been planned for 2019 in Ireland. We had to postpone it for technical reasons to 2020 when it was planned to be held in Kazan, Russia. The pandemic forced us to postpone again, first to 2021, now to 2022. During a recent virtual Board meeting, Dr. Gregor Tegl suggested to organize a monthly webinar on Chitin & Chitosans, including other biopolymers as they relate to chitin and chitosans. The idea met with broad approval, and Gregor volunteered to take the responsibility. We decided to have two talks each time, one from an experienced researcher and one from a young scientist, 20 minutes each, with a short discussion. Today, we started! As the current EUCHIS president, Bruno Moerschbacher had the privilege to give the first seminar, on “Structure-Function Relationships of Chitosans: The Pattern of N-Acetylation”, followed by Prof. Rupert Kargl from Graz University of Technology who talked about “Methods for the Processing and Shaping of Polysaccharide-Based Materials”. About 65 participants from all over the world, many of them not yet EUCHIS members, followed both seminars, and both speakers received interested and interesting questions – directly after the talk, and also later via email. We will try to make available the presentations on the EUCHIS website. And we are looking forward to the next seminars, on May 25th, again at 11 am.