Vera Meyer

As a visiting scientist her studies brought Vera Meyer to the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London (2003) and to the department of Fungal Genetics and Metabolomics at Leiden University in the Netherlands (2005 - 2006). In 2008 Vera Meyer was appointed assistant professor for Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology at Leiden University (Netherlands), a position she held for three years. Since 2011 she is professor at the Institute of Biotechnology and head of its department for Applied and Molecular Microbiology at the Technical University of Berlin. Her scientific work in the field of fungal biotechnology has been published in more than 90 publications (as of May 2019).

Vera Meyer also works as a visual artist, using the pseudonym V. meer. She puts a strong emphasis on sculpting and creating objects from chance finds like forest mushrooms, decaying wood and scrap metal. Inspired by her scientific work with fungi in microbiology, she combines these materials in the sense of an Objet trouvé. Through her art work she wants to enhance the awareness for fungi and their potential in biotechnology and for a sustainable bioeconomy in general.

Vera Meyer’s scientific work is particularly specialized on the research of the fungus Aspergillus niger as a cell factory. Meyer’s team of researchers at the Technical University of Berlin pursues a holistic approach, combining procedures out of synthetic biology and systems biology. Gene technology methods, such as CRISPR-Cas9 and the generation of huge omics data pertaining to Aspergillus niger, are being used for predicting gene functions and gene regulatory networks. This way Vera Meyer’s group succeeded in optimizing Aspergillus niger as a cell factory for proteins and, for the first time, for pharmaceuticals, too. As a long-term goal, combining systems biology and synthetic biology shall enable the transition from a descriptive to a predictive biology.

Vera Meyer promotes the idea of Citizen Science and demands a culture of open access with regard to scientific publications. She was founding the first Open Access Journal for the field of fungal biology (Fungal Biology and Biotechnology) in 2014. She is spokeswoman of the international Eurofung Network and particularly committed to the development of new antibiotics to face the spread of multi-resistant pathogens.

• Fungal Gene Expression on Demand: an Inducible, Tunable, and Metabolism-Independent Expression System for Aspergillus niger[4] (American Society for Microbiology, 2011)
• The beauty and the morbid: fungi as source of inspiration in contemporary art[5] (2016)
• Tet-on, or Tet-off, that is the question: Advanced conditional gene expression in Aspergillus[6] (Science Direct / Fungal Genetics and Biology, 2016)
• Openness and visibility of fungal bio(techno)logy[7] (2017)
• Vita activa in biotechnology: what we do with fungi and what fungi do with us[8] (2017)
• How a fungus shapes biotechnology: 100 years of Aspergillus niger research[9] (2018)
• Updating genome annotation for the microbial cell factory Aspergillus niger using gene co-expression network[10] (Oxford Academic, Nucleic Acids Research, 2018)
• Merging science and art through fungi[11] (2019)