Postdoctoral researcher
Mitja obtained his Msc in Pharmacy at the University of Vienna, Austria, in 2016. In 2017, he started as industry PhD candidate at the pharmaceutical company Naicons Srl in Milan, Italy, in the scope of the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action “Train2Target”. Under the joint supervision of Dr Margherita Sosio (Naicons Srl) and Prof Tanneke den Blaauwen (University of Amsterdam), he investigated rare actinomycetes for bioactive metabolites, using metabolomic and genomic tools. In 2021, Mitja successfully defended his thesis with the title “Metabolomic and Genomic Investigation into the Actinomycete Genus Planomonospora” and received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam. After a short break from academia to obtain his license as state approved pharmacist in Austria, Mitja took up a position as postdoctoral researcher under the joint supervision of Dr Justin van der Hooft and Dr Marnix Medema in the bioinformatics group at Wageningen University in early 2022. There, he works on the development of methods to better connect genomic and metabolomic data of environmental bacteria, which has implications for the discovery of new drugs from nature.
Mitja’s main research interests are bacterial metabolomics, genomics, and the pairing of such datasets. He is especially interested in the ecological roles of natural products, their activities and their potential use as drugs.
Main publications
Zdouc, Mitja M., et al. "Planomonospora: a metabolomics perspective on an underexplored Actinobacteria genus." Journal of NaturalProducts 84.2 (2021): 204-219.
Zdouc, Mitja M., et al. "Effective approaches to discover new microbial metabolites in a large strain library." Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology 48.3-4 (2021).
Embedded in the Bioinformatics Group of the Plant Sciences Group at WUR 