Round Table Seminar “Protein Biochemistry”

Until last year, Prof. Francisco Goycoolea led the round table seminar on “Food Biochemistry” in our fifth semester undergraduate module Biochemistry, but with him now at Leeds University in UK, we had to come up with a replacement. Prof. Gurvan Michel, internationally renowned expert on carabohydrate active enzymes at the Station Biologique de Roscoff in France, now AvH awardee and guest in our institute, took over the responsibility for a new round table seminar on Protein Biochemistry. On Monday, he repeated with the twelve undergraduate students the basic biochemistry of amino acids and their natural modifications, the peptide bond and secondary structures. On Tuesday, our alumna Dr. Mareike Dirks-Hofmeister, who is now managing the R&D-activities of WeissBioTech GmbH at the BRAIN AG facilities in Zwingenberg and our partner in the F2F and funCHI projects, took over to discuss with the students applications of enzymes in food biotechnology, mainly focussing on starch processing and the enzymes involved, particularly regarding properties that are crucial for the use of industrial enzymes. The next two days were again led by Prof. Michel, discussing first different biophysical methods to determine protein 3D structure with an emphasis on crystallography, then bioinformatics aspects such as functional annotation of proteins and the different bioinformatics tools to analyze a protein sequence. Finally on Friday, our alumnus Dr. Stephan Kolkenbrock, now Head of Enzymology at altona Diagnostics GmbH in Hamburg and partner in our nanoControl project, covered the bioinformatic processing of large metagenomic sequence data for enzyme mining and optimization procedures to generate a high target protein yield in a suitable expression strain. This new round table not only introduced the students to state-of-the-art protein biochemistry but also gave them an opportunity to interact with alumni of our group who are pursuing successful careers in the biotech industry.