Research focus

“Habitats harbor distinct microbial communities.”- This doctrine implies interactions between the environment and microbes and among the microbes themselves. It is the task for the working group “Biodiversity informatics” to characterize these communities and interactions. Hereby, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) massively generates molecular data of microbial communities with relative ease and low cost. The working group receives and analyzes data from both 16S gene sequencing and shotgun metagenomics studies. By applying conventional statistics and machine learning methods, it is our goal to shed new insight into the microbial diversity and their functions.