Claudia Höbartner

Claudia Höbartner studied Technical Chemistry at Technische Universität Wien. She did her diploma thesis at ETH Zurich, and after that completed her doctoral studies at Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck. In 2005, she moved to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign/USA as a postdoc with an Erwin Schrödinger Research Fellowship from the Austrian Science Fund. In 2008, she became the head of a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (today: MPI for Multidisciplinary Science) in Göttingen. In 2014, she became a professor of chemistry at Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen,^[1] and in 2017, she succeeded Gerhard Bringmann as Professor of Organic Chemistry I at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Würzburg.^[2]

Höbartner's scientific interest is in the nucleic acids DNA and RNA and their function as biocatalysts that mediate the course of biochemical reactions. In 2016, she published the first X-ray structure of a DNA enzyme (deoxyribozyme) that catalyzes the ligation of two RNA fragments in Nature.

She has developed DNA enzymes for the detection of modified nucleotides in RNA, too.^[3][4] In 2020, she reported, also in Nature^[5] the first methyltransferase ribozyme (MTR1), and published its structure and mechanism in 2022.^[6] The discovery of the methyltransferase ribozyme provides clues to the catalytic abilities of RNA, which may have played an important role during early evolution. Methylated nucleotides are found in the RNA of all living organisms at precisely defined sites that are essential for the structure and function of RNA. In addition, methylated nucleotides play an important role in mRNA vaccines.

Another project of her research group deals with the investigation of the replication inhibition of COVID-19 by Remdesivir and Molnupiravir.^[7]

• 2004: Roche Symposium Award (Leading chemists of the next decade), Basel, Switzerland
• 2005: Georg and Christine Sosnovsky Award, (Thesis Award, Universität Innsbruck, Austria)
• 2005: Erwin Schrödinger Postdoctoral Fellowship, FWF
• 2007: Hertha Firnberg fellowship, Austrian Science Fund (FWF) & BMWF
• 2010: European Young Chemist Award (EuCheMS, Silver Medal)^[8]
• 2011: Research Award of the Peter and Traudl Engelhorn Foundation
• 2013: Hellmut Bredereck Foundation Award
• 2016: ERC Consolidator Grant
• Since 2019 Corresponding Member Abroad, Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)
• 2020: ASEM-DUO-India Fellowship program for Professors
• 2022: Elected Member, Section Biochemie und Biophysik, German National Academy of Sciences – Leopoldina
• 2023: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (DFG)^[9]
• 2023: Order of the Bavarian Constitution, Munich, Germany^[10]
• 2023: Hansen Family Award