Chitin is considered the second most abundant biomass available on earth [14] . The estimated annual biosynthesis of chitin is more than 10 11 tons in marine waters alone [15] . Unlike cellulose, the other dominant biopolymer, chitin can serve as a source for both carbon and nitrogen (C:N = 8:1) [16] . This property suggests that chitin is an optimal resource for the production of NeuNAc (C:N = 11:1) because no additional nitrogen would need to be applied as it would be if glucose or cellulose were used as raw material. Chitin is found in the exoskeletons of arthropods, such as crustaceans (including crab, lobster, and shrimp) and insects (including ants and beetles), the cell walls of fungi, the radula of mollusks, and the beaks of cephalopods (including squid and octopi). This polymer is composed of β-(1,4)-linked units of the amino sugar N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc) that is currently produced using hydrolysis of deproteinized and demineralized crustacean shells [17] . Chitinolytic enzymes from fungi of the genus Hypocrea have been extensively studied for decades [18] . More recently, the chitinolytic enzyme system of H. jecorina has been studied using genome-wide analysis [19, 20] . Unlike their bacterial counterparts (e.g., Serratia marcescens [21] ), Hypocrea chitinolytic preparations have a high ratio of exochitinase to endochitinase activity and almost exclusively release monomeric GlcNAc from chitin [22] , which is another advantageous aspect of chitin compared to cellulose. Nevertheless, this raw material has not been adequately used. Therefore, the basic premise of this study was to exploit the potential of a saprophytic fungus to degrade the cheap biowaste chitin to its monomer GlcNAc and to further metabolize this product to NeuNAc.