Biosketch

Dr. Sonja Billerbeck

Trained in microbiology and biochemistry Sonja specialized in microbial synthetic biology. Her group uses a combination of environmental microbiology, protein engineering, genetic engineering, and functional genomics to access, understand, and engineer the functional diversity of nature’s yeast-based mycobiome for applications in human health and industrial biotechnology, as well as to answer fundamental questions on yeast (pathogen) biology. She focuses on three thrusts:

• Accessing, understanding, and engineering the yeast toxicome – antifungal proteins secreted by wild yeast - toward its use in human health, food, beverages, and agriculture.

• Sensing capacities of fungal G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) for fungi-specific drug design and biosensing applications in synthetic biology.

• Tools for the genetic engineering of unconventional bacteria and yeast

Three top publications 2017-2022

1. Billerbeck S, Prins RC & Marquardt M (2023) A modular cloning toolbox including CRISPRi for the engineering of the human fungal pathogen and biotechnology host Candida glabrata. ACS Synthetic Biology 12: 1358-1363; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.2c00560

This toolkit facilitates genetic engineering in Candida glabrata and enables functional genomics studies via CRISPRi.

2. Billerbeck S & Cornish VW (2022) Peptide-dependent growth in yeast via fine-tuned peptide/GPCR-activated essential gene expression. Biochemistry 61(3): 150-159; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.biochem.1c00661

We developed yeast strains that stringently require a peptide for growth such as required for biocontainment and selection purposes.

3. Billerbeck S, Brisbois J, Agmon N, Temple J, Jimenez M, Shen M, Boeke JD & Cornish VW (2018) A scalable peptide/GPCR language for engineering multicellular communication. Nature Communications 9: 5057; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07610-2

We genome-mined a large set of unstudied fungal G protein-coupled receptors and their corresponding peptide ligands, characterize them, and show that they can be used as an orthogonal language for cell-cell communication to build synthetic ecosystems.