Cable bacteria are true ecosystem engineers, as they have a disproportionally large impact on their environment. We want to understand know how such “electrical ecosystems” function.
Research questions
- Where do cable bacteria occur?
- How abundant and active are cable bacteria in natural systems?
- What is the impact of cable bacteria on the geochemical cycling and the local microbial community?
Research approach
The Microbial Electricity research team performs field work in a wide range of habitats across the globe, and combines methods from geochemistry (e.g. microsensor profiling, pore water and solid phase analysis) as well as techniques from molecular microbiology (e.g. amplicon sequencing, q-PCR, meta-genomics).