Hans Peter Grossart Seminar Friday, December 6, 2019 at 1:00 pm Amphi Oceanomed

6 December 2019

Hans Peter Grossart (IGB-Berlin) AMU guest professor will give a conference on Friday 6 December at 13:00 in the OCEANOMED amphitheatre on the following theme:

"Aquatic Microbial Ecology: Linking microbial diversity and biogeochemical functions"

Hans-Peter Grossart: https://www.igb-berlin.de/en/profile/hans-peter-grossart

Microbial communities are essential components of aquatic ecosystems through their contribution to food web dynamics and biogeochemical processes. Aquatic microbial diversity is immense and a general challenge is to understand how metabolism and interactions of single organisms shape microbial community dynamics and ecosystem-scale biogeochemical transformations. Recently, molecular approaches such as metagenomics have developed rapidly, and proven to be powerful in linking microbial community dynamics to biogeochemical processes. In my talk, I will highlight 3 examples of our ongoing work (both in marine and freshwater ecosystems), i.e. phytoplankton-bacteria interactions, microbial dynamics on microplastics, and methane production in oxic waters, which demonstrate the strength of linking molecular tools with state of the art biochemical analytics. These approaches not only allow for the discovery of new taxa, but also enable deeper insights into the metabolisms in aquatic microbiomes, community assembly, and functional ecology as well as evolutionary processes shaping microbial genomes and microbiomes. We aim to integrate molecular approaches into well-designed ecological experiments and to inform and validate metabolic and biogeochemical models to better interpret and project microbial and biogeochemical responses to a rapidly changing world.