My research

Nature har­bors bil­lions of bil­lions of bil­lions of proka­ryotic cells (10³⁰). These num­bers can be grouped into mil­lions of di­verse spe­cies. And each in­di­vidual spe­cies has unique physiolo­gical traits provid­ing suc­cess of the spe­cies in the ever chal­len­ging nature. These traits are of in­terest for man­kind for fu­ture ap­plic­a­tions.

Un­pre­ced­en­ted in­sights into the di­versity of genes and gen­omes have been achieved by cul­tiv­a­tion-in­de­pend­ent mo­lecu­lar tech­niques. These stud­ies are char­ac­ter­iz­ing the blue­prints of life, they de­scribe a po­ten­tial await­ing dis­cov­ery. Full in­sight into the bio­chem­istry re­quires in most cases first the isol­a­tion and cul­tiv­a­tion of mi­cro­bial strains as basis for the de­tailed char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of physiolo­gical traits, of en­zymes and of bio­chem­ical cas­cades.

The pro­ject group Di­versity & Cul­tiv­a­tion con­trib­utes to an un­der­stand­ing of the car­bon cycle in the sea by the isol­a­tion of mi­cro­bial strains from nature. Us­ing tra­di­tion growth strategies on solid me­dia and li­quid di­lu­tion-to-ex­tinc­tion cul­tiv­a­tion, we isol­ate srains and provide them for the ex­plor­a­tion of physiolo­gical traits in ge­n­omic, pro­teo­mic and bio­chem­ical stud­ies.

A fo­cus is cur­rently the de­grad­a­tion of poly­sac­char­ides from mi­croal­gae. As the cul­tur­aab­il­ity on solid me­dia is rather low, of­ten between 0.1 and 2 % of all bac­teria in the sea, we study al­tern­at­ive isol­a­tion strategies aim­ing at nat­ural pop­u­la­tion dens­it­ies. Li­quid cul­tures – drink­ing wa­ter to the hu­man eye – com­pris­ing one bil­lion cells per liter are suc­cess­ful en­rich­ment cul­tures and provide ac­cess to gen­omes and tran­scrip­tomes. For pro­teo­mic ana­lyses, we have to in­vent me­dia that make the mi­crobes happy in more dense cul­tures, even­tu­ally hav­ing a bil­lion of cells per mil­li­liter.

We are also mi­cro­bial physiolo­gists and study unique pe­cu­li­ar­it­ies of in­di­vidual strains on the cel­lu­lar level, in­teg­rat­ing bio­chem­ical, pro­teo­mic and physiolo­gical char­ac­ter­iz­a­tions with visu­al­iz­a­tion us­ing ad­vanced mi­cro­scopy tools of the De­part­ment of Mo­lecu­lar Eco­logy.

Mem­brane bio­syn­thesis: bi­opearl­ing

Bacteria make pearl chains 

Novel en­zymes for bi­o­tech­no­logy: lin­alool de­hyd­ratase-iso­merase

From the scent of roses to nylon and plastics

Evidence for predation: intron RNA in prey cells

Caught in the act: a gene jumps into the void