Our lab is located in beautiful Bavaria, Germany, at the Technical University of Munich (Freising campus). We are a newly established research group associated with the Professorship of Biotechnology of Horticultural Crops within the TUM School of Life Sciences.

We apply synthetic biology to engineer crops. In both our research and our lab culture, we actively cultivate diversity and inclusion.

Meeting the food demands of a growing global population will require a roughly 50% increase in crop production over the next few decades. Yet, current breeding strategies are approaching their limits, achieving less than 1% yield improvement per year. Combined with substantial yield losses caused by pests, this trend poses a serious threat to food security. New technological approaches are therefore urgently needed, and we apply synthetic biology and metabolic engineering to provide strategies to address these agricultural challenges.

Synthetic biology gives us the tools to redesign existing biological systems—or build entirely new ones. Our work follows the iterative design–build–test–learn cycle, where ideas turn into engineering experiments and results into new biological insight and human benefit. This hands-on approach allows us to engineer biological systems toward specific, real-world functions.
A key part of our toolkit is continuous directed evolution, a powerful method to rapidly evolve enzyme activities. To engineer plant proteins efficiently, we use yeast as a platform organism: its physiology closely resembles that of plants, and its short generation time makes it ideal for fast experimentation and discovery.