[28-01-2025] Biodiversity and water quality are strongly interconnected. The newly funded IQ-Wasser: KI & Biodiversität project will link artificial intelligence (AI) alghorithms to predict biodiversity changes in riverdam-mediated drinking water reservoirs in Germany to evaluate the effects on drinking water quality. As leader of the subproject Microbial diversity and ecology, Julia Nuy from our lab is contributing to this groundbreaking initiative disclosing ecosystem functions and pathogenicty potential of the microbial community.

[26.10.2023] A research team from the Universities of Münster, Bremen, Duisburg-Essen and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam has been awarded prestigious funding from the European Research Council (ERC): an "ERC Synergy Grant" worth a total of 11.5 million euros. In the six-year "Archean Park" project, the scientists want to gain insights into life under primitive conditions and find previously unknown metabolic pathways that made life possible for microorganisms on the primordial Earth 4,000 to 2,500 million years ago. 2.56 million euros of the funding will go to the UDE.

[27-07-2023] A new study in Nature Microbiology uncovers an unexpected role of CRISPR–Cas systems in archaea, showing that these defense mechanisms can target chromosomal DNA of their own episymbionts. Using meta-omics from extreme environments, researchers found that widespread DPANN archaea use CRISPR to regulate essential genes in their symbiotic partners, suggesting a dynamic relationship that shifts between parasitism and mutualism. This discovery reshapes our understanding of host-symbiont interactions in microbial ecosystems

Esser SP et al. Nat Microbiol. 2023 Sep;8(9):1619-1633. doi: 10.1038/s41564-023-01439-2. Epub 2023 Jul 27. PMID: 37500801.