GDCh Award for Biocatalysis for Sebastian Gergel
The German Chemical Society (GDCh) is awarding the GDCh Award for biocatalysis to Dr. Sebastian Gergel, EnginZyme AB, Solna, Sweden. The award ceremony will take place on September 12th during the annual meeting of the GDCh Division of sustainable chemistry in Mülheim an der Ruhr.
Sebastian Gergel
Ostflut.net - Fotograf Richard Westebbe
Sebastian Gergel receives the GDCh Award for Biocatalysis for his dissertation, which he completed at the universities of Stuttgart and Bielefeld. In it he dealt with protein engineering and the design of new enzymes.
Protein engineering deals with the design, optimization and production of proteins, including enzymes. Possible areas of application range from science to industry and agriculture. Protein engineering can play an important role, for example, in the development of new drugs and therapies, in the production of biofuels or in the development of new biotechnological processes.
In his work, Gergel combined mechanistic understanding of organic reactions with the methods of protein engineering, as well as their application in organic synthesis. He focused on directed evolution and mechanistic studies of carbonyl-selective alkene oxygenases and their application in asymmetric synthesis. Gergel was able to gain deep insights into the reaction mechanism of the biocatalytic Wacker oxidation. After successfully designing such enzymes, he was able to use them in regioselective or regio- and enantioselective Wacker oxidation.
The selection committee was convinced not only by the excellence of the content of the dissertation, which was rated "summa cum laude", but also by its linguistic and visual elaboration. The work also laid the foundation for further projects and resulted in a large number of high-ranking publications in top scientific journals.
Sebastian Gergel studied chemistry at the University of Stuttgart. He completed his doctoral thesis at the Universities of Stuttgart and Bielefeld. After completing his doctorate in 2021, he took up a position at EnginZyme AB, Solna, Sweden.
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