Virginijus Šikšnys

Biography

V. Šikšnys studied organic chemistry at Vilnius University, receiving his Masters in 1978, then moved to Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he studied enzyme kinetics and received Candidate of Sciences degree (equivalent to PhD) in 1983. From 1982 till 1993 he worked at the Institute of Applied Enzymology in Vilnius. In 1993 he was a visiting scientist in prof. Robert Huber’s laboratory at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biochemie, Martinsried, Germany. Since 1995 V. Šikšnys is the chief scientist and head of the Department of Protein-DNA Interactions at the Vilnius University Institute of Biotechnology, since 2006 – professor at Vilnius University and a member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, since 2007 – chair of the Institute of Biotechnology Council.

Research

The research interests of V. Šikšnys include structure-function relationships of enzymes involved in nucleic acids metabolism. V. Šikšnys and members of his laboratory perform biochemical, biophysical and structural studies of proteins involved in bacterial antiviral defense, including restriction endonucleases and CRISPR-Cas systems. V. Šikšnys has co-authored more than 90 scientific publications and filled 5 patent applications. For more than two decades Šikšnys’ lab was focused on restriction endonucleases. Together with colleagues from UK, Poland, Germany and other countries, Šikšnys has performed biochemical studies of more than 20 restriction endonucleases, and solved approximately one third (~15 out of ~50) of currently available restriction endonuclease tertiary structures, some of them in collaboration with the Nobel Prize laureate prof. Robert Huber. Since 2007 V. Šikšnys focused on mechanistic studies of CRISPR-Cas, the newly discovered bacterial antiviral systems, and was among the first to demonstrate programmable DNA cleavage by the Cas9 protein. The genome editing technology based on Cas9 was licensed to DuPont.

Honours and awards