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Community characterization and functional analysis of the microbiomes of livestock

The microbiota of vertebrates contributes significantly to various fundamental aspects of animal productivity and health. Whereas the human microbiome has been studied in great detail and depth, the microbiomes of farm animals are much less well known. Our research focuses on analyzing the variation in the microbiota in livestock in response to different nutrition, reproduction, and disease conditions.

Food safety – persistence of Listeria monocytogenes in food production environments

The food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes is a great concern for food safety because of the high mortality rate associated with listeriosis and because of the wide occurrence of Listeria monocytogenes in food production environments. Furthermore, the long-term survival of Listeria monocytogenes in food production environments – which is also called “persistence”, poses additional risks on food safety. However, the molecular mechanisms enabling the persistence of Listeria monocytogenes are still largely unknown. We are studying Listeria monocytogenes genomes, transcriptomes and apply molecular microbiology approaches to better understand the mechanisms for survival of Listeria monocytogenes in food and food production environments.

Symbiosis research - Host cell interaction of the insect symbiont Cardinium hertigii

This area of our research focuses on obligate intracellular bacterial symbionts of amoebae and we investigated how these symbionts interact with their host cells. One focus was the characterization of nucleotide transport proteins which are used by the symbionts to import nucleotides from the host, to compensate for their inability to synthesize nucleotides themselves.
Most insects carry bacteria that live within their cells and these bacteria are inherited from their mothers. These bacteria may manipulate their insect hosts’ reproduction in ways that improves the health or number of female hosts harboring the bacterium. Some of these bacterial symbionts can sabotage host sperm such that fertilized eggs laid by females without the bacterium die early in life a process known as “cytoplasmic incompatibility” or “CI”. Specifically, we are interested in the symbiont Cardinium hertigii and we are interested to discover the molecular mechanism by which Cardinium causes CI in insects.

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