Environmental Genomics
Complex communities of microorganisms influence human health and play important roles earth's geochemical cycles. Recent advances in high-throughput biology techniques make it possible to study the genetic potential and functional activities of natural microbial communities without the need for culturing.
Research
We primarily use metagenomics (shotgun sequencing) and taxonomic marker gene (16S/18S rRNA) sequencing for deepening our understanding of microbial communities. Our major focus is the Baltic Sea, where or work follows two major trajectories:
- To model the microbial ecological network that underpins the pronounced season dynamics in microbial community composition of surface waters.
- To reconstruct the genomes of the most abundant microbial players.
We are also involved in projects exploring other microbiomes, such as the human gut microbiota. To enable these projects we develop and optimize molecular as well as bioinformatics methods for community analysis.
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