Raymund started his PhD with the Zeller group in November 2023. He studied Molecular Biology and Organic Chemistry, earning an MSc Degree in Life Science at the University of Konstanz in Germany. This was followed by an internship at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK. During this time he worked on protein-small molecule interactions and structural patterns of enzyme catalysis.

Metagenomic sequencing efforts have revealed enormous sequence diversity. However, comparatively little is known about the functions of these genes nor the metabolites they give rise to. Many microbial secondary metabolites are produced by assembly lines of enzymes encoded in biosynthetic gene clusters. For his PhD Raymund will computationally explore the functional universe of microbial biosynthetic enzymes in the human gut using both classic computational tools and machine learning. With this work, Raymund also hopes to shed light on how some microbes contribute – potentially causally – to human disease processes.