Crab Shell team wins engineering award

A team of scientists and engineers at the Univ. of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) has received the Outstanding Engineering Achievement of the Year Award from the Engineering Society of Baltimore (ESB) for its work on processing Maryland crab shell wastes. The heart of the project is a new

"This project is converting a potentially polluting waste into a marketable product," says Gregory Payne, professor at UMBI's Center for Agricultural Biotechnology (CAB) who leads research to design new forms of the compound chitosan from crab shells. Chitosan is made from chitin, the structural polymer in crustaceans, insects, and some fungi. CAB researchers are changing the basic chemistry of chitosan, which is already used in products ranging from cosmetics to dietary supplements, to create products such as water-resistant adhesives, lubricants for oil drilling, and thickeners for cosmetics and other consumer products.