Prof. Martin Peter visited us for a seminar

Today, Prof. Martin Peter - founding member, former President and current Secretary of the European Chitin Society EUCHIS, former professor at the University of Potsdam and one of the globally leading chitosan experts - visited us and gave a seminar in our lab meeting. Prof. Peter has many firsts on his list of achievements, including the first chemical synthesis of fully characterised chitosan tetramers and the first mass spectrometric sequencing of partially acetylated chitosan oligomers. He also served as a very active member of the Scientific Advisory Board of our last European Research project Nano3Bio, so we owe him much. Today, he presented an extended version of his key note lecture which he gave last year at the International Chitin and Chitosan Conference in Japan. It was a critical literature review on the biological activities of chitin and chitosan oligomers and some other oligosaccharides of fungal and plant origin, e.g. derived from ß-glucans and pectins. He had analysed 600 recent papers on the topic, and he highlighted the weaknesses of many studies, including the use of poorly characterised oligomer mixtures, often at unrealistically high concentrations, the missing of standardised bioassays and, all too often, of crucial controls. It was a tour de force through a research area that clearly needs higher quality standards - a strong incentive for us to be the decisive notch better than others!