14th International Chitin and Chitosan Conference ICCC, 12th Asia-Pacific Chitin and Chitosan Symposium APCCS, 32nd Japan Society of Chitin and Chitosan Conference JSCCC, in Osaka, Japan

It is already three years ago that we organized ICCC 13 - 12 EUCHIS, the last large International Chitin and Chitosan Conference, jointly with the Meeting of the European Chitin Society, in Münster. ICCC is held every three years, rotating between Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Ibero-America (the next one will be in 2021 in Mexico). Bruno Moerschbacher, currently president of EUCHIS, together with Stefan Cord-Landwehr, Philipp Lemke, Lea Hembach and Eva Regel were our strong team in Osaka. Bruno gave the first plenary lecture of the conference, describing our approaches towards third generation chitosan polymers with non-random patterns of acetylation, Stefan gave a keynote lecture in the Young Researchers Session on our new enzymatic / mass spectrometric analysis methods for chitosan oligomers and polymers, Philipp presented the first results of his RNAseq experiment on chitosan-treated potato leaves, Lea Hembach presented her work on producing all 14 partially acetylated chitosan tetramers using chitin deacetylases acting in forward and reverse, and Eva Regel reported on her engineering approaches of our chitosanase MN to modify its subsite and substrate specificities to generate new chitosan oligomers, the latter two giving invited lectures. Clearly, we can be proud of our achievements! But also others presented news, such as the characterization of the first exo-chitosanase, amazing work on solubilizing chitin at -30°C so that it can be handled and derivatized, the first engineered chitosynthase based on an inverting GH19 chitinase, a synthetic approach towards chitosan oligomers with alternating GlcN and GlcNAc residues, etc. etc. And not least, we enjoyed Japan which is suffering under a similar heat wave as Europe this summer, marveled at the punctuality and accuracy of the trains (and everything else, including the bells ringing for the lectures), loved the tasty food, met with old friends and made new ones, collected samples of chitosans and chitosan-based products, and promised samples of ours to others. Full of ideas, and with much too little sleep, Bruno returned home while the other four continued to explore Japan a little further. We are looking forward to the next chitosan meetings, the EUCHIS meeting in Ireland in 2019, the APCCS meeting on Jeju island in Korea in 2020, and the ICCC/SIAQ meeting in Mexico in 2021.