Jan Brüwer

My research focuses on the bacterial life cycle from cell division to mortality in environmental bacteria. I mainly use different FISH methods and automated image analysis of thousands of images.

When a cell divides, it duplicates its genome and has to separate them into future daughter cells. We can see this through the microscope and can determine the frequency of dividing cells, which in turn is linearly correlated to the cell division rate. In this way, we can study the start of the bacterial life cycle.

Viruses are a known mortality factor. Although we know many viruses, we do not know how many host cells are infected by viruses in environmental samples. To tackle this challenge, we use direct-geneFISH to stain individual virus genes with fluorescent dyes. This allows me to detect phage-infected cells.

Find me on Twitter: @JanBruewer & @MolEcol_MPIMM.

2024

Brüwer JD, Sidhu C, Zhao Y, Eich A, Rößler L, Orellana LH, Fuchs B. 2024 Globally occurring pelagiphage infections create ribosome-deprived cells. Nature Communications. [doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48172-w]

2023

Brüwer JD, Orellana LH, Sidhu C, Klip HC, Meunier CL, Boersma M, Wiltshire KH, Amann R, Fuchs BM. 2023. In situ cell division and mortality rates of SAR11, SAR86, Bacteroidetes, and Aurantivirga during phytoplankton blooms reveal differences in population controls. mSystems. [doi: 10.1128/msystems.01287-22]

2018

Brüwer JD, Voolstra CR. 2018. First insight into the viral community composition of the cnidarian model metaorganism Aiptasia usring RNA-Seq. PeerJ 6e:4449 [doi: 10.7717/peerj.4449 ]

Brüwer JD, Buck-Wiese H. 2018. Reading the book of life - omics as a universal tool across disciplines. Youmares 8 - Oceans Across boundaries: Learning from each other. Springer, Cham, 73-82 [doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-93284-2_6]

2017

Brüwer JD, Agrawal S, Liew YJ, Aranda M, Voolstra CR. 2017. Association of coral algal symbionts with a diverse viral community responsive to heat shock. BMC Microbiology 17(1):174 [doi: 10.1186/s12866-017-1084-5 ]

2016

Buck-Wiese H, Voolstra CR, Brüwer JD. 2016. The metaorganism frontier - Incorporating microbes into the organism's response to environmental change. YOUMARES 7 - conference proceedings. [Link]