PhD project started: Our former Master student Lisanne Hameleers has started her doctoral project in Groningen in the Netherlands

This month, Lisanne Hameleers started her PhD project at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the group of the tenure-track assistant professor Dr. Edita Jurak. At the Institute of Aquatic Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering, she will be working on the identification and characterization of novel aquatic Carbohydrate Active enZymes (CAZymes), and functional carbohydrates. By investigating Polysaccharide Utilization Loci (PULs) of aquatic bacteria, novel CAZYms will be identified and their activity on various substrates will be tested by the use of a High Performance Anionic Exchange Chromatography (HPAEC) system coupled to Pulsed Electrochemical Detection (PAD). Lisanne had done her Master thesis with us in the framework of our European funCHI project. She heterologously expressed fungal genes which are supposed to be involved in building the covalent crosslink between chitin and glucans in fungal cell walls, and developed a mass spectrometric activity assay for the recombinant enzymes. She also cloned, expressed, and characterized another fungal chitin deacetylase which we use for the enzymatic synthesis of defined chitosan oligosaccharides. During her MSc project, she spent two months at Leiden University, in the group of our funCHI partner Prof. Arthur Ram, producing and analyzing knock-out and over-expression mutants of her genes of interest. Two manuscripts are in the making based on her results. We are sure that her MSc project has prepared her well for the challenges of her doctoral project for which we are sending our best wishes for success and fun! Lisanne, your project is so close to our own interests in Chitosan Active enZymes (the only true CAZymes!) that we hope to keep good contact, for mutual benefit.