Professor Dr Axel A. Brakhage

Axel Brakhage is distinguished for many important contributions to molecular biotechnology and infection biology of filamentous fungi. The majority of these studies were carried out in the Leibniz-Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology which, besides his chair of Microbiology / Molecular Biology at the University of Jena, he has been leading for 4 years. He contributed to the development of this Institute into a world-renowned institution. He made major contributions to research on the human-pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus for which he discovered the first pathogencity determinant and studied its interaction with immune effector cells. He has been working on eukaryotic transcription factors with emphasis on those regulating the biosyntheses of fungal secondary metabolites, many of them are important drugs.
His group was involved in the first activation of silent gene clusters in fungi by genetic engineering which led to the production of novel compounds. Also, together with another group his group was the first to show that microbial communication is of major importance for activation of silent gene clusters. This work allows the mining of these so far untapped reservoirs for drug discovery. Recently, his group also contributed to the discovery of a novel iron and redox reulatory mechanism in eukaryotes.