Competence Center for Biocatalysis

Margit Winkler has been appointed as the new head of the Competence Center, taking over the role with immediate effect. She succeeds her predecessor in leading the organization’s strategic and operational development, bringing extensive experience to the position.

Rebecca Buller follows a call to the University of Bern to take the role as Professor for Organic Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Congratulations to Lisa Schelbert for winning this year’s Lab Sciences Award for her bachelor thesis “Optimization of the Kemp Eliminase HG3 by Protein Engineering”! Lisa studied the fitness landscape of engineered Kemp eliminases and contributed to the CCBio publication on “Enriching productive mutational paths accelerates enzyme evolution” published in Nature Chemical Biology. 

Winner video on youtube

CCBio was founded in 2016 ,andis embedded in the From 2017 to 2021, CCBio led the network project «Innovation in Biocatalysis: A toolbox for sustainable bio-based production», a program supported by project contributions from the Swiss Higher Education Council. The section of Biocatalysis carries out several projects in close collaboration with academic and industrial partners.

Biocatalysis enables the sustainable production of chiral and highly functionalized compounds for the chemical,pharmaceutical and Flavour&Fragrance industries.

The Competence Center for Biocatalysis and its members from various research disciplines provide the necessary know-how to master specific challenges in the field of biocatalysis and protein engineering together with industrial partners.

The goals are:

• Sustainable manufacturing with enzymes and microbes
• Expansion of the biocatalytic toolbox 
• Collaborative research with industry to solve real-world challenges.
• Sustain the national platform for scientific knowledge transfer and dialog for participants from industry and academia
• Strengthen the topic of biocatalysis within the teaching portfolio of Swiss Universities 

CCBio is built on strong networks including the strong ties of its appointed Chair, Margit Winkler, to the Austrian Center of Industrial Biotechnology.

• Next Generation Bioproduction: in collaboration with TUWien, ACIB, the Politecnico in Milano and a company partner, this project aims to develop modular biocatalytic systems for the preparation of product panels.
•  Hydrogen driven enzymatic reactions: Molecular hydrogen is the most atom efficient reducing agent. Some enzymes and microbes are able to transfer electrons from hydrogen gas to small molecules. In this project, we are exploring enzyme catalysed reduction reactions in a customized hydrogen reactor that allows investigation of multiple reactions at the same time. 
• Novel enzymes for fragrance synthesis: Many aldehydes come with very characteristic smell – think of cinnamaldehyde and vanillin. Their chemical synthesis is challenging, but a number of enzymes are able to convert more stable and less volatile precursor molecules to valuable aldehydes. 
• Bringing enzymes that catalyze rare transformations closer to applications: Biosynthetic gene-clusters are composed of multiple components which work together like molecular assembling machines. Some of these clusters are very unique and possess modules which catalyze rare but synthetically valuable reactions.

• to be announced