Christine Beemelmanns honored with the award „Dozentenpreis des Fonds der Chemischen Industrie“

| by Alena Gold

Christine Beemelmanns, head of a junior research group at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology, received the „Dozentenpreis des Fonds der Chemischen Industrie“ (FCI). With this award, the foundation's board of trustees recognizes her outstanding achievements in research and teaching in chemistry. The prizewinners are nomiated by members of the Fund's Board of Trustees, former prizewinners or speakers of the German Research Foundation's Review Boards, and are selected in a two-stage nomination process.

"The award came as a complete surprise to me. I feel deeply honored to be awarded this prestigious prize," says Beemelmanns. The chemist and her group are investigating the chemical biology of microbe-host interactions. They focus particularly on the analysis of signalling molecules from microorganisms in complex symbioses in order to find out the importance of these substances in their ecosystem. They investigate the structures, genetic basis and functions of these natural compounds using modern analytical and molecular biological methods. Beemelmanns and her team often produce selected natural products themselves using organic-chemical synthesis to examine their structures and gain a profound understanding of the structure and effect of these substances.

With the prize money the FCI supports further steps in her career. "Presumably we will invest the funding in two state-of-the-art analytical instruments to further improve our molecular biology work and obtain higher resolutions for our analyses," says Beemelmanns.