Paper accepted: “Structural and biochemical insight into mode of action and subsite specificity of a chitosan degrading enzyme from Bacillus spec. MN”

Today, Dr. Ratna Singh’s and her co-workers’ manuscript on an in depth dry and wet lab analysis of “our” chitosanase was accepted for publication in Nature’s open access journal “Scientific Reports”. Ratna has been working on this enzyme for a long time and even the referees and editor remarked that this is a really fine piece of work, with data sufficient for more than one publication. With her bioinformatic skills, Ratna has opened up a whole new world for us in the past years, and almost everyone in our group has profited from this development. She now performed very sophisticated in silico modeling and substrate docking studies using tools of molecular dynamics, simulating the movement of two loops surrounding the active site of the enzyme upon substrate binding and catalysis. Comparing in silico data with experimental results when using different defined chitosans as substrates for the enzyme and analyzing the resulting products, Ratna developed a very detailed picture of the events during enzyme catalyzed chitosan hydrolysis. This insight already allowed the design of novel mutants of the chitosanase, with different and improved characteristics, e.g. yielding more of our biologically active target products. I think we can safely state that with this work, “our” chitosanase advances to the position of “best characterized chitosanase in the world”.