Research Focus

We are interested in several aspects of microbial evolution, in particular in the diversity of biological systems with focus on energy and carbon microbial metabolic strategies and how they evolved from one to the other.

• Bioenergetic evolution with focus on- “lego” nature of protein complexes, fusions, large scale single gene phylogenetic investigations (tens of thousand genes at a time), large scale comparative genomics, pathway distributions across prokaryotic domains.

• Physiology and ecology of Archaea with a focus on the metabolism of the different groups of archaea, their innovations, evolution and diversity.

• Automatic classifications of metabolism based on (meta)genomic data.

Group Members

• Abidin Erdost Irmak, B.Sc.
• Anwar Hiralal, PhD
• Val Karavaeva, M.Sc.
• Constantin Leitgeb, B.Sc.
• Anastasiia Padalko, M.Sc.
• Jordi Zamarreno Beas, PhD

Former projects

• Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF): "Pan-metabolic profiling of Archaea"
• ERC Starting grant: "Evolution of Physiology: the link between earth and life"
• University of Vienna, Vienna Doctoral School of Ecology and Evolution: "Microbial biotransformations in biogeochemical cycles"

Current collaborations

William F. Martin. Institute of Molecular Evolution, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. D-40225
Düsseldorf, Germany (http://www.molevol.hhu.de/)