Current Science

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More than 200 years ago, Henri Braconnot, a French chemist, described chitin in mushrooms. It took about a hundred years for Albert Hofmann in Switzerland to decipher the structure of chitin from the snail, Helix pomatia. Chitin, a long chain polymer of N-acetylglucosamine, is found in the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters, shrimps, in the mouth parts of most molluscs, cell walls in fungi, scales of fish and on certain amphibians and nematodes. As a polysaccharide, it is second only to cellulose, in terms of abundance.
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