Roman Jerala (born 1962) is a Slovenian biochemist and synthetic biologist, internationally best known as the leader of Slovenian teams that won the Grand prize at the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition several times.
Jerala was born in Jesenice, a town in then People's Republic of Slovenia, FPR Yugoslavia.
[1] Jerala was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2017,[2] EMBO in 2017 and to the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences SAZU in 2019.
In 2013, Nature Chemical Biology published an article about Jerala's achievement that paves a path to designing and producing completely new protein shapes using reprogrammed bacteria by synthesizing protein that folds itself into a tetrahedron — a pyramid with a triangular base measuring just 5 nanometres along each edge - which can be used as container for delivering drugs on the nanoscale.
[3] Dek Woolfson, a biochemist from Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information, UK, described this kind of engineering with the following words:[3] This type of assembly has been achieved before using DNA, but it has always been assumed that it would be much harder to do this with proteins because there is no straightforward code that relates sequence to structure, as there is with DNA.Jerala's team is trying to double the size of the coiled coils in the tetrahedron, and made other shapes, such as prisms and bipyramids.