Projects

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 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.

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.