Claudia Höbartner

Claudia Höbartner is an Austrian-born chemist. She currently teaches as a professor at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.

Life and work

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 in Göttingen. In 2014, she became a professor of chemistry at Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, and in 2017, she succeeded Gerhard Bringmann as Professor of Organic Chemistry I at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Würzburg.

Research areas

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 that catalyzes the ligation of two RNA fragments in Nature.
She has developed DNA enzymes for the detection of modified nucleotides in RNA, too. In 2020, she reported, also in Nature the first methyltransferase ribozyme, and published its structure and mechanism in 2022. 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

Academic distinctions

2004: Roche Symposium Award, Basel, Switzerland
2005: Georg and Christine Sosnovsky Award,
2005: Erwin Schrödinger Postdoctoral Fellowship, FWF
2007: Hertha Firnberg fellowship, Austrian Science Fund & BMWF
2010: European Young Chemist Award
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
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
2023: Order of the Bavarian Constitution, Munich, Germany
2023: Hansen Family Award

Other activities

Since 2020 Associate Editor Royal Society of Chemistry “Chemical Biology”
Since 2015 Editorial Advisory Board, ChemBioChem

Selected publications

C. Höbartner, M.-O. Ebert, B. Jaun, R. Micura: RNA‐Konformationsgleichgewichte und der Einfluss der Methylierung von Nucleobasen auf die Gleichgewichtslage. In: Wiley Online Library. 2002.
A. Serganov, S. Keiper, L. Malinina, C. Höbartner u. a.: Structural basis for Diels-Alder ribozyme-catalyzed carbon-carbon bond formation. In: Nat Struct Mol Biol. Band 12, 2005, S. 218–224. doi:10.1038/nsmb906
D. Heller, H. Jin, B. Martinez, C. Höbartner u. a.: Multimodal optical sensing and analyte specificity using single-walled carbon nanotubes. In: Nature Nanotech. Band 4, 2009, S. 114–120. doi:10.1038/nnano.2008.369
A. Ponce-Salvatierra, K. Wawrzyniak-Turek, U. Steuerwald, C. Höbartner u. a.: Crystal structure of a DNA catalyst. In: Nature. Band 529, 2016, S. 231–234. doi:10.1038/nature16471
C. P. M. Scheitl, M. Ghaem Maghami, A. K. Lenz, C. Höbartner u. a.: Site-specific RNA methylation by a methyltransferase ribozyme. In: Nature. Band 587, 2020, S. 663–667. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2854-z
A. Liaqat, C. Stiller, M. Michel, M. V. Sednev, C. Höbartner: N6-isopentenyladenosine in RNA determines the cleavage site of endonuclease deoxyribozymes. In: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Band 59, 2020, S. 18627–18631. doi:10.1002/anie.202006218