Paper accepted: Quantitative enzymatic-mass spectrometric analysis of the chitinous polymers in fungal cell walls.

Today, our doctoral candidate Mounashree’s first first-author paper has been accepted for publication in the renowned journal “Carbohydrate Polymers”, with our postdoctoral researcher Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr as the senior author. In this paper, which is also our first paper coming out of the German-Norwegian collaborative research project LignoLIPP , they describe a method for the analysis of chitin and chitosans in fungal cell walls, allowing them to accurately quantify the total amount of chitin and chitosans and their overall fraction of acetylation. While chitin is widespread in nature, chitosan is not, it is so far known to occur only in some fungal cell walls, and mostly restricted to special developmental stages such as sporulation or growth within a host tissue. Commercial chitosans are produced by partial chemical deacetylation of chitin and, consequently, they appear to possess random patterns of acetylation. We hypothesize, however, that natural chitosans produced by enzymatic deacetylation in fungi may possess non-random, e.g. blockwise acetylation patterns. But structures and functions of natural chitosans are unknown at present. As we have recently shown that the pattern of acetylation critically influences both the physico-chemical material properties of chitosans and their biological functionalities, we believe that understanding the role of acetylation in natural chitins and chitosans is key to improving the performance of chitosan-based products and applications. The current method is a first decisive step in this direction, and Mouna and Stefan are already working on the next steps, so watch out for what is to come.