Young Scientists Competition Awards

for Georg Schütz and Linda Schwaigerlehner

At the ACB2019 - 14th Asian Congress on Biotechnology – (Taipei, Taiwan – July 2019) Georg Schütz and Linda Schwaigerlehner, two PhD students of the PhD program BioToP, have been awarded for their excellent scientific work.

Georg Schütz is PhD student at the Institute of Food Technology under the supervision of Dietmar Haltrich. He won the first prize of the Young Scientists Competition Oral Awards for his work on "New Insights into the Characterization of PQQ-dependent Coprinopsis cinerea Pyranose Dehydrogenase". He presented the recently discovered fungal enzyme Pyranose Dehydrogenase with the uncommon eukaryotic cofactor pyrroloquinoline (PQQ). The reaction kinetics and substrate specificity were investigated to get more insight into the intra-protein electron transfer.

Linda Schwaigerlehner, PhD student at the Department of Biotechnology under the supervision of Renate Kunert, received the Young Scientists Competition Poster Award for her outstanding poster entitled "Gene Expression Changes in Response to Expressed Mab Variant in CHO Cells". Her poster showed novel investigations on transcriptional differences in recombinant Chinese hamster ovary cell lines cell lines during the expression of various therapeutic antibody variants. This enabled the identification of potential genes, that could be targets for increasing the expression level of certain antibody variants.

Both projects are funded by the FWF and the PhD program "BioToP – Biomolecular Technology of Proteins". The supervisors Prof. Dietmar Haltrich and Prof. Renate Kunert are cheering for their students.

Website of the PhD program BioToP: https://biotop.boku.ac.at/

25.07.2019