Oliver Gericke

Short presentation

I am currently undertaking my PhD studies in Plant Biochemisty at University of Copenhagen. My PhD is focused on the exploration of chemical diversity in the Eremophila genus using both molecular biology and computational approaches. Within my molecular work, I have specifically focused on discovering pathways of enzymes involved in diterpenoid synthesis and modification. The work has included transcriptomics and functional characterization methods to identify enzyme candidates. and eventually metabolic engineering of these in S. cerevisiae and E. coli to produce pure ­Eremophila diterpenoids for downstream applications. In addition, I have developed a computational pipeline to explore the chemical space of the whole Eremophila genus using metabolomics and molecular networking approaches. This work will help to shed light on the unknown chemistry present in Eremophila and facilitate the search for new bioactive compounds. My work is mainly supervised by Dr. Allison Heskes and Prof. Birger Møller and funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation highly collaborative project “Desert-loving therapeutics”. I am a member of the High Value Phytochemical group led by Assistant Prof. Irini Pateraki at University of Copenhagen.