Home | Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology

A cladogramm illustrates the evolution of a modular enzyme

Three Forces, Many Natural Products

A team led by Helge Bode and Georg Hochberg has for the first time deciphered the evolutionary forces behind the diversity of bacterial natural products.

Professor Tobias Erb has been elected to the German Academy of Science and Engineering

The acatech, under the patronage of the German Federal President, advises politics and society independently, fact-based, and with a focus on the public good on key technological future challenges.

3D representation of a complex molecular structure with distinct colored segments and blue arrows indicating electron-transfer pathways

Two Microbes, two Solutions

Methane-producing microorganisms perform one of the most energy-intensive reactions in biology: the conversion of CO₂ to methane. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology have now discovered that there are different molecular strategies for this task.

Frau Kahmann with the former Leopoldina-Vize President Prof. Dr. Ulla Bonas and with mit Leopoldina President Prof. Dr. Bettina Rockenbach

Regine Kahmann Receives the Cothenius Medal

The National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina honors the Director emerita at the MPI-TM for her lifetime achievements

Methane molecules and a picture of wetlands

A New Perspective on an Ancient Process

Methane-producing microbes play a central role in the global carbon cycle and contribute significantly to the greenhouse effect. A team led by Dr Seigo Shima has now found that organic compounds inactivate nickel-free enzymes even in natural samples. This provides a simple way to study the formation of methane in nature.

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.

We currently employ over 300 people from more than 35 countries. Together with its two affiliated centresSYNMIKRO and Microcosm Earth Center (MEC), MPI-TM is one of Europe’s leading institutes in the fields of molecular and synthetic Microbiology.
As part of the newly founded Microbes for Climate (M4C) Cluster of Excellence, we are collaborating with the Marburg University to research microbial metabolic networks and optimize them in order to develop sustainable solutions for the fields of health, the environment, and biotechnology.