CV
I conducted my diploma and PhD thesis in the group of Prof. Marko Mihovilovic and obtained my PhD in 2007 from TU Wien (TUW). During my PhD-studies I was on a 3 month internship at Syngenta AG, which is one of the largest global agro-business companies in the world. Furthermore I was part of the COST action D25 and went for a STSM (short term scientific mission) to the Université de la Méditerranee (Marseille, France) in the group of Dr. Veronique Alphand. After my PhD degree I applied and received an'Erwin Schrödinger fellowship' and went for a postdoctoral stay in the group of Prof. Uwe Sauer at ETH Zurich. My research was mainly conducted to Molecular Systems Biology (metabolomics and fluxomics) and specifically to the rapid metabolic and TOR signaling responses in Saccharomyces cerevisiae upon different nitrogen input signals.
In 2011 I returned to the TU Wien and started my independent scientific career in the field of systems biocatalysis. Since December 2017 I became Assistant Professor at the TU Wien at the Institute of Applied Synthetic Chemistry. My main field of interest is enzyme cascade catalysis and how to establish synthetic cascades in living cells.
In 2006 I won the poster prize at the Gordon Research Conference of Biocatalysis (Smith Field, Rhode Island, USA) and 2007 I was finalist of the DSM award in Vitznau, Switzerland.
Research
The general aim of my research is to apply a 'retrosynthetic' approach for the synthesis of chiral building blocks via a multi-enzymatic synthesis in living cells. Thereby, a de novo designed pathway of ‘non’ related enzymes will be introduced into the well established model organism Escherichia coli. The enzymatic cascade is designed by coupling enzymes according to their functional group transformations of a particular class of substrates. Hence, the de novo pathway will be linked to the central carbon metabolism of E.coli. Thereby the glycolytic substrate dihydroxy acetone and the corresponding product of the de novo pathway will undergo the final step of the enzymatic cascade. By merging both pathways the maintaining metabolism of the host and the new pathway gets highly inter connected. In order to study as many parameters as possible in the model systems it is the general vision to combine methods and tools of metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, systems biology, and biocatalysis, in particular a) metabolic flux analysis (MFA), b) metabolomics (LC-NMR-MS; LC-MS/MS), c) mathematic modeling (flux balance analysis (FBA)), and d) retrosynthetic analysis to conduct de novo design and application of non-natural biosynthetic platforms for multi-step-reactions in microorganisms.