News / Dates

On 31 October 2025, Diana passed her doctoral examination with summa cum laude. We congratulate her warmly on this great success!

Diana's path to IBOC began during her master's studies in Romania, when she came to us on an Erasmus scholarship. What initially began as a stay abroad quickly developed into a close and formative connection with the institute. Our colleague Ben aptly said: ‘She gave the institute an international flair that is currently sorely missed.’

With her dry sense of humour, her helpfulness and her in-depth knowledge of…

Last Thursday, Elias Pfirmann successfully defended his master's thesis entitled

‘Allylation via methyltransferases: Towards new pyrroloindole derivatives’ – congratulations, Elias!

He is known among his colleagues for not doing things by halves – ‘If you're going to do it, do it right’ is clearly his motto. Whether in the laboratory or beyond, he doesn't just break one leg, but both if necessary.

In his work, he chemically produced allylated diketopiperazine derivatives and worked intensively to minimise the undesirable background reaction…

Once again this year, IBOC impressed in the Heine Research Academies' ‘Part of Research’ calendar competition! The competition, now in its tenth year, invites all HHU institutes to showcase their research from a new, creative perspective.

Our institute will be represented in the upcoming 2026 calendar with a joint contribution by Viktoria Warth, Andreas Sebastian Klein and Irene Küberl. Our submitted image shows a laboratory fume cupboard, colourfully decorated with little treasures from everyday laboratory life – and a few surprising details.…

We warmly congratulate Nina Stadler on the publication of her latest paper in Green Chemistry! The study, funded by the BioSC project ToxPot, shows how plant by-products can be used as a source of valuable natural substances without competing with food production.

The focus of the study was on the extraction of the steroidal glycoalkaloids α-chaconine and α-solanine from potato material. In addition to the successful extraction, Nina also describes the environmental impact by calculating the E-factor – a measure of the ecological efficiency of…

From 24 to 30 August 2025, the BASF International Summer Course took place in Ludwigshafen, which our doctoral student Lisa Böhmer had the opportunity to attend.

The week offered a varied programme with exciting lectures and discussions on how the chemical industry is positioning itself for a sustainable future. In addition to professional exchanges with BASF experts, there were also exclusive insights on site. In the laboratories and production facilities, participants were able to experience industrial practice up close and take away…

Our doctoral students Matthias Bleser and Lea Hoppe took part in this year's International Symposium on Advances in Synthetic and Medicinal Chemistry (FMC-ASMC) in Portugal. Both presented a poster (Derivatisation of Cycloprodigiosin for use as Potential Antimicrobial Compound / Flow Synthesis for Physostigmine Precursors) and thus actively contributed to the scientific exchange.

With numerous participants, the conference was one of the larger events in the field of synthetic and medicinal chemistry. Although this made it impossible to take in…

Since last week, Pia Josephine Franz, a biochemist, has been supporting our PhD student Simon Przetak in the lab. As part of a research internship, she will be part of our institute until shortly before Christmas.

We warmly welcome you, Pia, and wish you an exciting, enriching, and insightful time with us!

From August 18 to 21, our doctoral students Viktoria Warth, Catharina Gronkowsky, and Marisa Bickmann took part in the Summer School Biotransformation in Bad Herrenalb, representing our institute.

The close exchange was particularly valuable: around half of the participants came from industry or were professors, which led to exciting discussions and interesting insights.

Highlights included presentations by Covestro, Numaferm, Brain Biotech, and Evonik. In addition, our colleagues were able to try out SynSilico's AI tool INNOptimizer for…

Our colleague Mona Haase passed her doctoral examination with summa cum laude on 8 September 2025. We congratulate her wholeheartedly!

Mona began her academic career at HHU, where she studied biochemistry. She wrote her bachelor's thesis at our institute and went to Jan Deska at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry at Aalto University in Finland for her master's thesis. She has been back with us since 2021, working on her doctoral thesis entitled

‘Application of C3-methyltransferases for natural product synthesis’. Since then, she has done…

We are pleased to announce that Mona Haase recently published part of her research findings in Protein Science. In this paper, she addresses the difficult methylation of indole-C3 in pyrroloindole structural motifs, which are building blocks of many biologically active natural products.

Mona investigated the methyltransferase SeMT from Saccharopolyspora erythraea and, through targeted redesign, developed a variant with significantly higher activity towards decetopiperazine substrates. It is particularly exciting that the findings on the…