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Draft:Andriy Luzhetskyy

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Andriy Luzhetskyy is a researcher in natural products and a Professor in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at Saarland University, Germany. He heads the Actinobacteria Metabolic Engineering group and has authored more than 145 scientific articles till date. His work revolves around synthetic biology, natural product discovery, and biosynthetic engineering of actinobacteria. He is also the head of the CENtR (German-Ukrainian Core of Excellence in Natural Products Research) project which aims to create new collaborations between Ukraine and Germany.[1] [2]

Background

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Andriy Luzhetskyy was born in Busovysko, Lviv region, Ukraine in 1977. Andriy majored in biology at the University of Lviv, Ukraine; he graduated from the Department of Genetics and Biotechnology, Ivan Franko Lviv National University (1994 to 1999). In his master's thesis, he had focused on genetics and microbiology. During his PhD, he was awarded a DAAD fellowship to spend time at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg from 2002 to 2003. In 2003/2004, he completed his doctorate under Prof. Victor Olexandrovych Fedorenko at the Laboratory of Genetics and Genetic Engineering of Industrially Important Microorganisms, Ivan Franko Lviv National University and received the Eugen-Graetz award for the best thesis.[3]

Academic Career

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After his PhD, Andriy Luzhetskyy joined the Institut für Pharmazeutische Wissenschafte at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in 2004, where he formed his own junior research group in 2006 and worked until 2010. In 2011, Andriy moved to Helmholtz Institute of Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) in Saarbrücken, Germany and received the DECHEMA prize for junior natural products researchers, with which he started the group on metabolic engineering of actinobacteria. Soon after this, he received the ERC Starting Grant for “Exploitation of actinomycetes genomics using synthetic and system biology approaches” in 2012. He then became Professor of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at Saarland University in October 2015 and he is still associated with Helmholtz Institute of Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), Helmholtz Center for Infection Research.[4]

The Humboldt Foundation mentions him as "head of one of four German-Ukrainian cores of excellence which the Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding to the tune of 10 million euros." [5] The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has helped initiate the efforts for establishing a center of excellence between Ukraine and Germany for discovery of anti-infectives, to be named the CENtR (German-Ukrainian Core of Excellence in Natural Products Research) project, receiving 2.5 million euros in funding. The German side of the initiative is set at Saarland University, HZI, and HIPS whereas the Ukrainian side is to be set in Lviv in western Ukraine, including both Explogen and Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, supported by the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU). [6]

Scientific Work

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Andriy Luzhetskyy works on metabolic engineering of different actinobacterial strains by applying synthetic biology to potentiate and optimize production of biosynthetic gene clusters in the genome.[7] His previous work has looked into the capabilities of the Streptomyces albus J1074 strain as a potential model for heterologously expressing cryptic biosynthetic gene clusters as well as a synthetic promoter library for actinomycetes. The work aims to generate new natural products that have antibiotic potential while also developing robust systems for actinomycetes expression of the compounds.[8]

With over 8000 citations, he has an h-index of 48 and an i10-index of 132.[9]