Nediljko Budisa

In 2015, the team led by Ned Budisa reported the successful completion of a long-term evolution experiment that resulted in full, proteome-wide substitution of all 20,899 tryptophan residues with thienopyrrole-alanine in the genetic code of the bacterium Escherichia coli. This is a solid basis for the evolution of life with alternative building blocks, foldamers or biochemistries. At the same time, this approach might be an interesting biosafety technology to evolve biocontained synthetic cells equipped with a "genetic firewall" which prevents their survival outside of man-made unnatural environments. Similar experiments with flourinated tryptophan analogs as xenobiotic compounds (in collaboration with Beate Koksch from the Free University of Berlin) has led to the discovery of exceptional physiological plasticity in microbial cultures during adaptive laboratory evolution, making them potential environmentally friendly tools for new bioremediation strategies.

Ned Budisa earned a High school teacher diploma in Chemistry and Biology in 1990, a B.S. in Molecular Biology and MSc in Biophysics in 1993 from the University of Zagreb. He received a PhD in 1997 from the Technical University of Munich where his thesis advisor was Professor Robert Huber. He also habilitated at the Technical University of Munich in 2005 and worked afterwards as a junior group leader ("Molecular Biotechnology") at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich. Between 2007 and 2010 he was a member of CIPS in Munich. He was appointed as full professor of biocatalysis at the TU Berlin in 2010 until the end of 2018, when he accepted the Tier 1 CRC position in Chemical Synthetic Biology at the University of Manitoba. Ned Budisa is also a member of the Excellence Cluster ‘Unifying Systems in Catalysis’ (UniSysCat) and keeps adjunct professor status at the TU Berlin. In 2014, he founded the first Berlin iGEM team.

Nediljko "Ned" Budisa (Croatian: Nediljko Budiša; born November 21, 1966 in Šibenik, Croatia) is a Croatian biochemist, professor and holder of the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (CRC) for chemical synthetic biology at the University of Manitoba. As pioneer in the areas of genetic code engineering and chemical synthetic biology (Xenobiology), his research has a wide range of applications in biotechnology and engineering biology in general. Being highly interdisciplinary, it includes bioorganic and medical chemistry, structural biology, biophysics and molecular biotechnology as well as metabolic and biomaterial engineering. He is the author of the only textbook in his research field: “Engineering the genetic code: expanding the amino acid repertoire for the design of novel proteins”.