Chemie IOCB News

Biocatalysis is one of the key technologies, that will shape not only the industrial landscape, but also our daily lives in the future. This interdisciplinary field of research, which combines biology and chemistry, opens great perspectives for basic research as well as industrial applications. This was part of the occasion of the 13th International CeBiTec Symposium “Multi-Step Syntheses in Biology & Chemistry - An International Young Investigator Conference” that was held at Bielefeld University on December 2019. Head speakers have been Prof. Shuji Akai from the Osaka University in Japan, Dr. Daniel Fitzpatrick from the University of Cambridge, Prof. Julia Frunzke from the Research center Jülich and Dr. Matthias Höhne from the University of Greifswald. Fields of tailor-made bio-catalyst design and applications thereof, combination of biocatalysis and chemocatalysis and synthetic biology towards multi-step syntheses from both, an academic and industrial perspective, were part of this symposium. In addition, emerging recent trends mostly done so far out of the area of biocatalysis, which, however, are expected to have a strong impact on biocatalysis in the future will be addressed such as, for example, flow-chemistry, machine learning self-automatization. A further focus of this symposium were contributions of young researchers to present their research achievements and latest results in the plenum as well as lectures and poster presentations. They had the opportunity to present their work and to discuss on the future prospects of biocatalysis in order to promote the networking of the next generation of biocatalysis researchers.