Best Poster Award for Katharina Beck at EMBO | EMBL Symposium in Heidelberg
Congratulations to our postdoc Katharina Beck, who received a Best Poster Award at the EMBO/ EMBL Symposium Metabolic Interactions Shape Ecosystems, held at EMBL Heidelberg on 21–24 July 2026.
The international symposium brought together researchers from diverse fields to explore how metabolic interactions influence biological ecosystems, from microbial communities and host–microbiome interactions to environmental and engineered systems. A key aim of the meeting was to connect research communities that do not typically meet at the same conferences, facilitating the exchange of new ideas, approaches, and methodologies.
Our postdocs Katharina Beck and Gaohua Yang represented the lab at the meeting. Katharina presented the poster “When Homology Fails: Functional Diversity in urocanate reductases”. Her work was selected as one of the Best Poster Award winners among 52 posters presented at the symposium.
Katharina’s research addresses an important challenge in microbiome science: predicting what microbial genes and enzymes actually do based on their sequences and structures. The study focuses on urocanate reductase (UrdA), a microbial enzyme involved in the production of the disease-associated metabolite imidazole propionate. By combining enzyme kinetics, structural analyses, and mutagenesis, the researchers identified key amino acids within the enzyme’s active site that determine its substrate specificity and catalytic activity.
The findings demonstrate that even small changes in an enzyme’s active-site architecture can alter its specificity and metabolic output. This highlights the limitations of relying solely on sequence or structural similarity to predict microbial gene function and provides a framework for improving functional annotation. Ultimately, a better understanding of these microbial metabolic pathways may help reveal mechanisms linking the gut microbiome to host physiology and disease.
Gaohua also contributed to the scientific programme with a selected short talk, “A gut microbial phenylalanine-preferred decarboxylase shapes microbiome-host aromatic amino acid metabolism,” presented during the session on metabolic microbiome–host interactions.
Beyond presenting their research, the symposium provided Katharina and Gaohua with an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas, meet researchers from different disciplines, and establish new connections – with some time to celebrate the poster award and enjoy Heidelberg as well!