Actinobacteria Metabolic Engineering
This group is located at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS)
The growing resistance towards established antibiotics presents a serious problem especially with infectious diseases. The development of new drugs is mainly based on known molecules and mechanisms, which allows bacteria to assimilate rapidly. Hence, scientists are looking for novel drugs. At the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), a branch of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) at Braunschweig, the researchers develop new pathways, by which they force actinomycetes to produce hitherto unknown compounds.
Leader
Dr Andriy Luzhetskyy
Actinomycetes are built up of approximately 8000 genes, and of more than 3000 genes we do not know yet, which proteins they encode – and what the bacteria use them for at all.
The Ukrainian Andriy Luzhetskyy has studied biology at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine, where he worked on genetics and microbiology during his master thesis. He did his doctoral thesis at the “Laboratory of Genetics and Genetic Engineering of Industrially Important Microorganisms” at Lviv and received the Eugen-Graetz award for the best thesis. He then changed to the Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Albert-Ludwigs University at Freiburg where he founded his own junior research group in 2006.
Since 2011, he heads a junior research group at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS). In February 2011, Andriy Luzhetskyy was awarded with the DECHEMA prize for junior researchers in natural products research. Andriy Luzhetskyy has been Professor of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at Saarland University since October 2015.
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