Dr. Stephan Hammer from the Institute of Biochemistry and Technical Biochemistry has been elected for the Emmy Noether program of the German Research Foundation (DFG). He has received funding to establish a research group to address “new catalytic reaction development by laboratory evolution of protein-based catalysts”.
Generating new enzyme function is a long-standing goal in chemical biology and has disruptive potential to various fields such as industrial biocatalysis, biomedicine and synthetic biology. The new Emmy Noether research group focusses on a highly interdisciplinary approach to engineer new enzymes for synthetic organic chemistry. The primary focus is to access previously unknown C-C and C-X bond forming reactions by discovering, developing and understanding new catalytic principles in enzyme-catalyzed reactions. Research in the Hammer research group combines methods from synthetic organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, protein biochemistry and molecular biology and will thus attract students from chemistry and biology.