Department Environmental Microbiology

With the goal to identify general principles of microbial community resilience, we are examining how core microbial functions hold up when the environment shifts. Although overlapping abilities among species and their interaction networks are thought to underpin stability, we still lack a clear, systematic picture of how specific traits and network structures shape whole‑community responses across conditions. To close this gap, we are building synthetic bacterial communities that deliberately differ in species makeup, metabolic skill sets, and interaction patterns, drawing on strain libraries from marine habitats.

Using high‑throughput droplet microfluidics, we are able to measure thousands of community cultures at once, tracking substrate turnover and growth across gradients of temperature, pH, and nutrient complexity. This setup allows us to test whether resilience springs from shared ecological features, and how trait distributions, resource landscapes, and network architecture steer the outcome.