Dr. Harald Gruber-Vodicka

Evolution, Function and Ecology of Marine Symbioses

My research focuses on the evolution, the function and the ecology of marine symbioses. I strive to test hypotheses and to gain a mechanistic understanding of the functions and processes in marine animal-microbe interactions. I am particularily interested in intracellular interactions and I use two main models, chemosynthetic symbioses in shallow water sediments and placozoans – microscopic benthic grazers on biofilms. In addition I develop bioinformatics tools to integrate molecular ecology and next generation sequencing.

Main research topics are

• Host - Symbiont fidelity
• Symbiont Function
• Host - Symbiont Interaction
• Reductive Genome Evolution
• Host and Symbiont Taxonomy

I have developed software that analyses metagenomes based on the small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU) reads and reconstructs full length SSU genes from metagenomic data for all domains of life

phyloFlash - rapid reconstruction and phylogenetic exploration of SSU rRNAs from Illumina (meta)genomic or transcriptomic datasets
https://github.com/HRGV/phyloFlash

Please visit my personal homepage for more details: http://hgrubervodicka.weebly.com/