Ed Bayer is a Full professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. He was awarded a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Michigan in 1969, a Master’s Degree in Biology from Wayne State University (Detroit, Michigan) in 1971, and a Ph.D. Degree in Biophysics from The Weizmann Institute of Science in 1976 under the supervision of Meir Wilchek.
During his scientific career, he has pioneered two separate areas of research: the avidin-biotin technology and the field of cellulosomes.
Since the early 1970s (during his PhD studies), he has been involved in the development of the avidin-biotin system as a general tool in the biological sciences. He was the first to develop biotinylation procedures for antibodies and other proteins, carbohydrates, etc., and avidin-conjugation and complexation techniques. The work was initially published in the mid-1970s in collaboration with Meir Wilchek, and many of the original procedures are still in routine use today.
Together with Prof. Raphael Lamed, he discovered the cellulosome concept in the early 1980s. In 1999, he was organizer and Co-chair (together with David Wilson of Cornell) of the first Gordon Research Conference on "Cellulases and Cellulosomes", and he served as Chairman of the same conference in 2001. In 1994, he proposed the use of “designer cellulosomes” for biomass degradation, waste management, and as a general tool in the biological sciences. Since then, he has worked systematically towards the controlled construction of such artificial cellulosomes via self-assembly and has produced a growing repertoire of divergent cellulosomal components for this purpose. The designer cellulosome systems were originally developed as a model approach for improved degradation of cellulose to eventually serve as an alternative energy source to help displace our growing dependence on fossil fuels.
During his career, he has collaborated with groups in the United States, Canada, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Finland, Denmark, Guatemala, China, Japan, Australia, and the Republic of Georgia. He has authored over 280 articles and reviews in both fields. He co-edited Volume 184 on "Avidin-biotin technology" of the Methods in Enzymology series, since 1999 has served as editor of the review journal, Biotechnology Advances, and since 2007 has been an associate editor of a new open-access online journal, Biotechnology for Biofuels. He currently serves on the scientific advisory board of one of the DOE Bioenergy Centers (BESC).
In 1990, he received the Sarstedt Award, together with Meir Wilchek, for his contributions to the avidin-biotin system for biomedical analysis, presented by the German Association for Clinical Chemistry (Nümbrecht, Germany), and in 2006 he received the Ulitzky Prize, awarded by the Israel Society for Microbiology for his work on cellulosomes. In 2002, he was elected to Fellowship of the American Academy of Microbiology.
He continues his work in both the avidin-biotin and cellulosome fields, and his interests continue to focus on the structural and functional consequences of protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions, protein engineering, nanobiotechnology, biomass degradation and biomass-to-biofuels processing.