The Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience
Please welcome Dr. Andri Frediansyah to Whitney Laboratory!
He recently joined Dr. Sandra Loesgen’s lab as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellow sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and AMINEF (American Indonesian Exchange Foundation).
Currently, Fred is a senior researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) of the Republic of Indonesia, based in Yogyakarta. He has an interest in studying natural products produced by microorganisms and their functions in human health, food development, agriculture, and ecological interaction.
He earned a B.Sc. in biology from Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, sponsored by the Tanoto Foundation. His B.Sc. thesis focused on the isolation and characterization of both phenotypic and molecular methanotrophic bacteria from peatland ecosystems in Central Borneo, Indonesia, under the supervision of Prof. Endang Soetariningsih Soetarto. He also found that some bacteria that live in peatland ecosystems, like Paenibacillus durum, P. macerans, P. azotofixans, and P. polymixa, make plant growth hormones, specifically Indole acetic acid, on their own. During his B.Sc., he also found that Neosartorya fischeri and N. quadricincta could reduce the presence of sulfate in the peat soil ecosystem. Thus, he began to develop an interest in studying the production of metabolites by microbes.
In 2015, he obtained an M.Sc. in Applied Biological Sciences from Chulabhorn Graduate Institute, Bangkok, Thailand, sponsored by the ASEAN Foundation. He studied liver cytotoxicity, oxidative DNA damage through 8-hydroxy-2’-deoxyguanine (8-OHdG) formation, and repair of 8-OHdG through hOGG1 expression in HepG2 cells treated with various concentrations of aflatoxin B1, B2, G1, and G2 extracted from peanut and its peanut products under the supervision of Dr. Panida Navasumrit. During his Masters, he employed RT PCR and LC-MS/MS. In addition, his research thesis received the Best Student award from the Japan Society for Environmental Chemistry in 2014. During his master's, he also conducted non-lab mini-projects related to malate synthase inhibitors for LTBI under the supervision of Prof. Peter C. Dedon and Prof. John M. Essigman from MIT.
He then continued his research on microbes and metabolites for a Ph.D. that RISET-Pro was funding in mid-2017. In 2020, he got his Ph.D. degree magna cum laude in pharmaceutical biology from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany, with a focus on the isolation of novel natural products produced by Proteobacteria in Harald Gros’s lab, including the genera Massilia, Telluria, Janthinobacterium, Xanthomonas, and Burkholderia. During his Ph.D., he discovered a new compound called massiliamide produced by Massilia albidiflava, which is a cyclic tetrapeptide with potent tyrosinase inhibitor properties. In 2019, he got the Novo Nordisk Travel Award to attend and present this peptide at the Copenhagen Bioscience Conference. In addition, with his colleague, he also contributed to the discovery of trinickiabactin produced by Trinickia caryophili and terpenibactin A-C produced by Nocardia terpenica.
At Whitney Laboratory Fred will conduct research on microbial natural products by applying the metabologenomics approach to discover natural products produced by halophilic bacteria from Kakaban saline lake. In addition, he is eager to establish future academic collaboration with scholars at Whitney and gain further expertise in the elucidation of natural products produced by microbes.
Outside of the laboratory, he enjoys city tours, experiencing different cultures, exploring new places, discovering new ideas, cooking, going to the movies, and playing with Zuzu (his cat).