Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology

Projects

  • The Plant-Pollinator-Microbe Triangle

    Despite the major ecological and agricultural importance of plant-pollinator associations, the microbiota of the anthosphere and of wild pollinators are not well understood. I started to work on this line of research during the final phase of my doctoral studies with first floral microbiome assessments, and now supplement this as a young investigator groupleader with the bee-microbiota association perspective. I adress fundamental questions about diversity and community structure, but also aim to understand the ecological functions and the molecular mechanisms.

  • Carnivorous Plants: Co-Evolution of Traps and Microbiota

    Carnivorous plants are marvelous research objects and have been studied for over a century. In most cases they grow in nutrient-depleted, acidic soils with centres of diversity in the tropics. They derive nutrients usually from arthropod prey, which they catch and digest with adapted morphological capturing-structures, and likely with microbial help. Surprisingly little is however known about such associations with microorganisms.

  • Eco-Evo Molecular Tool Development

    Biodiversity research on a molecular level has reached a new height with the advent of affordable sequencing methods, especially with next-generation devices. Sequencing data provides information about the evolutionary history, allows identification of all organisms within a community through meta-barcoding and uncovers not only species but also genetic diversity through genomics. Furthermore, such data is of high taxonomic resolution, independent of previous knowledge of taxa, well-comparable between workgroups, long-term achievable and re-usable in meta-analyses. Yet, currently molecular and bioinformatic tools are missing to generate and process such data in the ecological context. We thus engage into the method development of tool in this area.