The primary reason (besides pursuing my PhD) for why I joined the Lab in early 2015, is trying to understand functional relations between microbes. Establishing what defines those similarities (and differences) between bacteria, is a vital step in comprehending the interactions in microbial communities.

Solving the challenges arising from the explosive growth of available data, is one of the interesting factors of this research. Many of the default protocols established by the scientific community simply are not suited to deal with the amounts of data we are dealing with today. However in the end this will still be just a means to answer the actual questions like: How can we isolate and grow monocultures of bacteria for which it so far was impossible? Can we establish functional pathways between bacteria within a community? How big of an impact does environmental pressure have of the functional diversity of bacteria? Is taxonomic diversity of a microbiome truly correlated functional diversity? I am hoping to help answer all those questions and more with the work I am currently doing.