Fungal Molecular Ecology & Biotechnology

Peer-reviewed publications

Follow me at ResearchGate [link]

or at Google Scholar (link)

FIS der TU Dresden (link)

I favor open access publications.

2018 International Mycological Congress in Puerto Rico (poster)
2017 ESA Annual Conference at Portland USA (talk)
2015 Mycological Society of America, Annual Conference, Edmonton Canada (poster)

February 2012
DOE Genomic Science Program, Bethesda, MA; poster co-author
April 2011
Ecology of Soil Microorganisms, Prag, Czech Republic
August 2010
International Mycological Congress - IMC9, Edinburgh, Scotland; talk
June 2010
OxiZymes, Leipzig, Germany; talk
May 2010
Yeasterday 2010, Leuven, Belgium; talk
 

Current
Working as Senior Scientist and Teacher at the Department of Environmental Biotechnology, International Graduate School (IHI) Zittau (Germany) now Institute of the Technical University Dresden

December 2008 - November 2010
Working as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the group of Prof. Micheline Vandenbol at the Department of Microbiology of the Animal and Microbial Biology Unit at the FUSAGx - Agricultural University of Gembloux, now: Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech (GxABT), part of University of Liege (Belgium).

September 2007 - November 2008
Working as Research Associate and later as Postdoctoral Research Fellow (PostDoc) at different projects in the Soil Research Group of Prof. Donald R. Zak of the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) at the University of Michigan (USA).

November 2007
Finishing of my PhD thesis at University of Leipzig and the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) Halle-Leipzig GmbH, Department of Soil Ecology. The topic was embedded in the DFG joined research program SPP 1090 "Soils as source and sink for CO₂".

June 2003
Diploma degree in Biology at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena (Germany).

1999-2000
Two semesters at Aristoteles University of Thessaloniki (Greece) supported by the ERASMUS program.

Work and education

Participation in conferences

I am interested in fungal molecular biology and soil ecology. My research field is mainly focused on fungi and less on bacteria. I aim to get a closer view on functions within soils using transcriptomic and proteomic techniques. Hereby I focus on fungal enzymes mainly involved in the degradation of lignocellulose, which is the most abundand biopolymer on earth. I work also on genes involved in nitrogen and phosphate cycling in soil. A main question is how fungi shape with their enzymatic sets the soil environment and finally whole ecosystems. In which biogeochemical cycles are specific fungal groups involved, and when and “how much” are they active?

General interest

Equipment

My recent interests are omics technologies, mainly NGS and bioinformatics. At Zittau we have a Molecular Lab including: IonS5 & IonChef, Covaris S2, Inverse Microscope, PCR, Geldocumentation, Elektrophoresis. sterile Workbench, Oxfort Nanopore MinION.

Inverse Microscope

Ion Torrent - semiconductor sequencing platform, retired 2017; successor: IonS5

Covaris S2