Third EUCHIS webinars on Chitin and Chitosans: Non-Marine Sources and Enzyme-Based Analysis

The regular monthly Chitin & Chitosans webinar of the European Chitin Society had its third appearance today, again with two presentations. First, Dr. Thomas Hahn from the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology in Stuttgart present the long-standing work of this group on using alternative sources for the extraction of chitin. His talk focused on Black Soldier Flies which are all the rage currently as the coming new source for animal feed (and possibly human food), generating increasing amounts of chitin-rich waste by-streams. Since more than a decade, all the emerging and rapidly growing insect farms are interested in valorizing this material but as Dr. Hahn nicely showed, this is not a trivial task. The main problem, like when trying to use fungal cell walls as an alternative chitin source, are the covalent linkages tethering chitin into the complex biological matrices in which they are embedded. While insect cuticles cannot yet compete with crustacean shells in terms of quantity and quality (or production costs) of chitin extracted, we can certainly expect further improvements to come. The second talk was given by Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr from our group, the master mind behind the development of enzymatic mass spectrometric analysis and fingerprinting tools for chitosans. Stefan showed how using mass spectrometry can help to analyze the subsite specificities of chitinases, chitosanases, and chitin deacetylases, and how the well-characterized enzymes can then be used to analyze the fraction and pattern of acetylation of chitosan oligomers and polymers. His talk perfectly complemented that of Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher given two months ago on the role of acetylation patterns in biological activities of chitosans, nicely showing how progress in analytical methods can propel advances in understanding biological phenomena.