It Ma(t)Ters

Our first keynote speaker is Prof. Dr Helge Bode. Since 2020, Prof. Bode is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg. He is the head of the department of Natural Products in Organismic Interactions, which focuses on the identification, regulation and engineering of biosynthetic gene clusters for novel natural product discovery. Prior to his directorship at the MPI, Prof. Bode held a professorship position in biotechnology at the Goethe-university in Frankfurt from 2008 to 2020. Here, he focused on bacterial natural products and charactering these within ecological communities.

Vir­uses that in­fect mem­bers of the third do­main of life, the ar­chaea, were shown to be very dis­tinct from vir­uses in­fect­ing bac­teria and eu­k­a­ryotes. Their dis­cov­ery has opened up a new fas­cin­at­ing world of vir­o­logy. Ar­chaea were ini­tially thought to in­habit only ex­treme en­vir­on­ments such as hot springs, hy­dro­thermal vents or very salty lakes (so-called hy­per­saline en­vir­on­ments) and the ma­jor­ity of the ar­chaeal vir­uses isol­ated to date come from such en­vir­on­ments. However, we know today that ar­chaea and their vir­uses also play a very sig­ni­fic­ant role in mod­er­ate en­vir­on­ments such as the ocean, but no ar­chaeal vir­uses have been isol­ated from mar­ine en­vir­on­ments so far.

One ma­jor re­search fo­cus of the new group will be the re­la­tion­ship of vir­uses with mem­brane ves­icles. Dur­ing her re­search of hy­per­saline Ant­arc­tic lakes, Erd­mann dis­covered a new virus-like ele­ment, the so-called plas­mid ves­icles (PVs). These al­low us to draw con­clu­sions about how vir­uses might have evolved. The evol­u­tion of virus particles ap­pears to be closely re­lated to mem­brane ves­icles, which are pro­duced by all liv­ing cells and serve a range of cru­cial func­tions in cel­lu­lar com­mu­nic­a­tion and in­ter­ac­tions with the en­vir­on­ment, in­clud­ing pro­tec­tion against viral in­fec­tion.

Since 2020, Dr Höfer is a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, where her group studies the epitranscriptomics of gene regulation based on post-transcriptionally modified RNAs in bacteria. She completed both her doctoral and postdoctoral research at the University of Heidelberg from 2012 to 2020, where she established methods to identify, characterise and engineer post-transcriptional modifications of RNA molecules.

In the Eco-Evolutionary Interactions group we are studying how lucinid clams and their microbial partners adapted to diverging environmental conditions during a massive allopatric speciation event caused by the rise of the Isthmus of Panamá. Our motivation for doing research is to move from correlation to causation in studies of host-microbe evolution. As oceans undergo major changes due to human activities (for example ocean warming and acidification), understanding how animals and plants adapt to a changing environment is now more than ever one of the biggest questions in marine biology. To predict future responses, we can explore the past and use geological events, which provide valuable insights into adaptive mechanisms.

Dr. Laetitia Wilkins launched a new research group less than a month ago. Before, she worked as a postdoc in California, Panamá, and Costa Rica, where she studied the co-evolution of animal hosts and their associated microbiome. To better understand the ecology and evolution of symbioses, Dr Wilkins and her group members now use experimental set-ups, fieldwork, as well as bioinformatic and statistical tools and isotopic analyses. Their research can be summarized into three major research topics: (i) symbiotic macroevolution across the Isthmus of Panamá, (ii) assessing the ecological history using biogeochemistry, and (iii) manipulating symbiosis to understand short-term evolution.