Eckhard Boles was born in 1963 in Altena in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and graduated from Burggymnasium Altena in 1983. From 1985 to 1990 he studied Chemistry and Biology at the University of Cologne and completed his studies with a diploma in Biology with a diploma thesis on the uptake and secretion of amino acids in Corynebacterium glutamicum at the Institute for Biotechnology of the Forschungszentrum Jülich in the research group of Reinhard Krämer. From 1990 to 1994, Boles worked as a scientific assistant at the Institute of Microbiology and Genetics at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the research group of Friedrich K. Zimmermann, where he received his doctorate in 1994 with a thesis on the regulation of glycolysis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Until 1995 he stayed at the TH Darmstadt as a post-doctoral fellow and worked on the function of fructose-2,6-bisphosphate in the glycolysis of baker's yeast. From 1996 to 2001 he worked as a scientific assistant at the Institute for Microbiology at the University of Düsseldorf and until 2000 he worked on his habilitation on glucose transport and metabolism in yeasts. He received his Venia Legendiin 2001 and remained as a senior assistant at the University of Düsseldorf until 2002. In 2002 he moved to the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he was appointed to a chair as C3 Professor of Microbiology. Since November 2011 he has been W3 Professor of Microbiology with a focus on Physiology and Genetics of Lower Eukaryotes at the same institute. In the summer of 2007, Boles co-founded Butalco GmbH, Zug, Switzerland, together with Gunter Festel. In 2012 Butalco sold its xylose technology to the French yeast producer Lesaffre, which wanted to become the worldmarket leader for yeast for the production of first-generation cereal-based bioethanol and also active in the second generation sector. Two years later Lesaffre took over Butalco completely and integrated it into the Lesaffre group as an independent unit. Boles was also co-founder of the biotechnology company Gothia Yeast Solutions in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Research topics
The research work of Eckhard Boles and his research group focuses on the investigation of general metabolic and regulatory processes of yeasts as well as the development of technologies to improve the applications of yeasts in biotechnology. The research focuses on
