Our JACS and PNAS papers in the media: “Der heilige Gral der Pflanzenforschung - Neue Möglichkeit entdeckt, Pflanzen widerstandsfähiger zu machen“

Today, the website www.pflanzenforschung.de commented in detail on our recent JACS paper in which we described the mono-acetylated chitosan tetramer carrying its acetyl group at its reducing end sugar unit. This website, which is financially supported by BMBF, regularly reports on advances in plant science research with relevance beyond pure science, to emphasize the impact of plant research on the society and the environment. The article is entitled “The Holy Grail of Plant Research” – quite a statement! And concomitantly, several websites reported on our recent PNAS paper on the chitosan deacetylase used by the human pathogenic fungus C. neoformans to hide from the immune system. These included GIT Laborportal, Kompakt Pneumologie, Science X who also linked it to the JACS paper, and the Verband Biologie, Biowissenschaften und Biomedizin VBio. Of course, we are happy to see that our papers meet with such broad attention. However, we haven’t seen anyone yet making the connection: the immune system of both plants and humans recognizes fungi by the presence of chitin, pathogenic fungi try to evade this recognition by converting chitin into chitosan using chitin deacetylases, the hosts have learned to recognize chitosan as well to mount their defenses. It’s the red queen race of evolution (“It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place”). For the time being, it would appear that C. cryptococcus is in the lead, evading recognition by evolving a chitosan deacetylase. But wait and see…