A Stirring Story
In the natural environment, bacteria live in mixed communities that play an important role in our health, agriculture and industrial processes. A team led by Remy Colin has now discovered how swimming bacteria form these complex structures by entraining non-swimmers.
A Bacterial Symbiosis in Transition
Bacteria in flagellates in termites: This is the fascinating complexity of the termite gut. A team led by Andreas Brune has investigated how the partnership between flagellates and bacteria has evolved and how the metabolic performance of the bacteria is linked to this.
Synthetic and Speedy
Vibrio natriegens is the bacterium with the fastest known growth rate. Researchers led by Dr. Daniel Schindler have discovered that the fact that it has two chromosomes, like its relative Vibrio cholerae, is not the reason for its speed. They have developed an equally fast variant with just one chromosome, which could simplify research and applications in the future.
Tobias Erb receives an ERC Advanced Grant
Congratulations to our Director Prof. Dr. Tobias Erb on this prestigious funding from the European Research Council
First Discovery of a Molecular Fractal
Fractal patterns in nature can be found in macroscopic objects such as riverbeds or fern leaves. At the molecular level, however, fractals were unknown. Now a team including Georg Hochberg and Franziska Sendker found that a cyanobacterial citrate synthase has a famous fractal structure.
Welcome to the
Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology
Life without microorganisms is simply impossible. Microbes were the first life forms on early Earth. They evolved the ability to capture carbon dioxide and nitrogen, providing life with energy and nutrients. Microbes also invented photosynthesis, brought oxygen to the atmosphere and gave birth to multicellularity and the evolution of higher life. Microbes are more numerous and diverse than all other living organisms and there is no ecological niche that is not covered by them. They live in constant interactions with their environment, affecting health, agricultural productivity, and the climate on a global scale.Our mission is to understand the function, communication, and interaction of microorganisms with their environment, to describe them with mathematical models, and to modify them with synthetic biological approaches.
We specifically focus on the microbial metabolism of greenhouse gases, the synthesis and function of bioactive natural compounds, cellular communication and regulation networks, as well as their spatial and temporal organization. Our research scale ranges from the atomic level up to global ecosystems.
Together with our two affiliated centers, SYNMIKRO and the Microcosm Earth Center, MPI-TM is one of Europe’s leading Institutes in the fields of Molecular and Synthetic Microbiology, currently hosting more than 300 scientists and students from more than 35 countries.
