Birgit Wiltschi received a PhD in Biochemistry from Graz University of Technology in Austria. She continued her scientific work as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany and afterwards was a group leader at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany. Currently, she is a principal investigator in BiocatCodeExpander and the FET-open project PURE at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. In addition, she heads the Synthetic Biology Group at the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology. Her research focusses on the engineering of proteins using unnatural amino acids, for instance to introduce site-selective bioorthogonal protein modifications.

RELEVANT LITERATURE:

M. Galindo Casas, P. Stargardt, J. Mairhofer, B. Wiltschi, Decoupling protein production from cell growth enhances the site-specific incorporation of non-canonical amino acids in E. coli, ACS Synth. Biol. 2020, 9, 3052-3066.

P. Fladischer, A. Weingartner, J. Blamauer, B. Darnhofer, R. Birner-Gruenberger, T. Kardashliev, A. J. Ruff, U. Schwaneberg, B. Wiltschi, A semi-rationally engineered bacterial pyrrolysyl-tRNA synthetase genetically encodes phenyl azide chemistry. Biotechnol. J. 2019, 14, e1800125.

F. Tobola, E. Sylvander, C. Gafko, B. Wiltschi, ‘Clickable lectins’: bioorthogonal reactive handles facilitate the directed conjugation of lectins in a modular fashion, Interface Focus 2019, 9, 20180072.