📣 New PhD student position opening in my lab!
Soils are full of microbes, but how many are active?
Surprisingly, we still lack reliable methods to answer this.
If you are interested in microbial dormancy and are fascinated by the Alps and glacier forefields, contact me.
🏔️ 🦠 💤 🧬 🎓

📢 🦠 🏜️ Meet the first cultured methanogens from oxic soils! Using cultivation and comparative genomics, we descirbe Methanobacterium limanense sp. nov., Methanocella ebodanensis sp. nov., and a strain of Methanosarcina mazei as dwellers of desert biocrusts.
With @anne-daebeler.bsky.social and other

📣 If you're interested in the #arthropod #microbiome and its implications for soil and #biogeochemical_cycling, I'll be giving a webinar on the topic of "Ecophysiological implications of the millipede microbiome" in the ACTIONr webinar series.

Here's the link: us06web.zoom.us/j/8595969393...

Starting our third joint group retreat. I'm really happy that @anne-daebeler.bsky.social and I managed to turn this into a tradition. @BiologyCentre

A new Dr. was born!
Congratulations, @julipeale, and good luck in your new position with @YergeauE.
Thanks to @LuedersLab @SaudiDaudi for being such great reviewers. It was fun hosting you here.
Also, thanks, @m_wutkowska, for the pictures.

New collaborative publication in @DesalinationJ showing bacterial succession and growth of Actinobacteria at the expense of Proteobacteria on a reverse-osmosis biofilm using DNA-SIP
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Stable isotope probing showed us very slow labelling of the gut bacteria and somewhat faster for fungi

Also suppressing CH4 production did not affect them much, and their gut methanogens survived and revived after impression was eliminated.

Antibiotics nearly eliminated their microbiota but had no effect on their weight.

We continue our work with millipedes. Here, we wanted to see how dependent millipedes are on their gut microbiome. Do they fully depend on it like termites, or is it expendable, like in caterpillars?

Lastly, we found low virus-to-microbe-ratios and a prevalence of lysogenic viruses, supporting a Piggyback-the-Winner dynamic in both hosts.

More exciting, we show that the most common auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs) found in the viruses are related to chitin degradation (GH 18 and 19). This gives further support to our conclusions from our previous Microbiome paper.

We continue our work with millipedes. Here, we conducted one of the only comprehensive surveys of DNA and RNA viruses in arthropod guts. We show that viral communities are different between the species and that this reflects the differences in the gut microbiome.

As the title says, however, we found many of the metabolic functions to be shared. One big surprise was that the most common secreted glycoside hydrolases (GHs) were targeting fungal cell walls and not cellulose.

We used two model species: one tropical and CH4 emitter and one temperate none-CH4 emitter.
Size matters here: the bigger one harbours more microbes and has a more complex community

בודווייס, שבדרום מערב צ'כיה (מאיפה שהבירה!) לפני זה וינה, לפני זה מרבורג, גרמניה, לפני זה ישראל 🙂