Second Workshop of the German/Tunesian “MatBio” project in Münster

This week, we organised the second workshop of the German/Tunesian project “Biomaterials with Improved Properties - MatBio”, which is financially supported by BMBF, in Münster. This project had been initiated by Dr. Imen Kacem when she was a post-doctoral researcher in Prof. Francisco Goycoolea’s group in our institute, it was taken over by Dr. Nour Eddine El Gueddari when Francisco left for the University of Leeds, and then by Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr when Nouri passed away earlier this year. Imen, who is now at the University of Gafsa in Tunisia, brought her doctoral student Akila Ben Nasr and her collaborator Prof. Hatem Majdoub from the University of Monastir to discuss the work done so far in the project, and the plans for her own two-week stay and the one-month stay of Akila in our group. From our side, Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher gave an overview of our work on structure-function relationships of chitosans, Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr explained our mass spectrometric fingerprinting tools for chitosans, Dr. Sruthi Sreekumar and Stefan Hoffmann reported on their work producing and using chitosan-based nanoparticles and nanocapsules. Prof. Majdoub gave an overview of his work on bioactive polysaccharides from Tunesian flora and fauna, while Imen and Akila reported on their work on coating medical textiles with chitosans. We are looking forward to Imen and Akila’s stay and work with us.