Institute of Biosciences - Head of Institute: Prof. Dr. Michael Schlömann
Environmental Microbiology
The environmental microbiology group is headed by Prof. Dr. Michael Schlömann and currently works on the fields: bioleaching, iron oxidizing bacteria, halophilic microorganisms, (bio-based) metal winning processes, isolation and description of novel bacterial strains as well as several other applied microbiology topics. The institute has a large strain collection including many soil bacteria, acidophilic strains and rarely described iron oxidizers. The following equipment and methods are used: cultivation at various conditions (acidic to neutral pH, various temperatures and gas atmospheres, high pressure, etc.), process controlled fermentation, next-generation-sequencing, GC-MS, HPLC, microscopy (various formats), clove box, (real-time) PCR, blotting, electrophoresis, fingerprint methods, and many more.
Junior Research Group - Dr. Dirk Tischler
Dr. Dirk Tischler has an independent research group and works currently in field of functional annotation of biocatalysts. The work usually starts with (meta)genomic data and the need to produce a certain compound of interest. Biocatalysts are predicted on sequence base and structural modelling can be employed to deepen the understanding. Cloning, mutagenesis, expression and activity assays allow proof of the predictions made. Biocatalysts are optimized and available for production studies. The team is situated at the Institute of Biosciences and has access to all the above mentioned equipment and can provide even more specialist tools as rapid-mixing (double mixing stopped flow), anaerobic titration, absorbance and fluorescence spectroscopy, chiral HPLC and GC, enzyme immobilization, ICP-MS and many more.
Our team welcomes students and researchers for trainings, internships, lab+lecture courses, and is interested in collaborations! In case of any question, please, do not hesitate to contact us!