Alejandra Alvarado - Postdoc
''Hi there! I spend my time in the Link Lab understanding interactions between relevant cellular metabolites and transcription factors in bacteria by integrating metabolome and transcriptome data. Why, you ask? Understanding the influence of metabolism on gene expression and regulation opens tons of possibilities to develop tools and strains that can help us make useful compounds. I am also interested in the role of metabolism in the establishment of synergistic and antagonistic microbial interactions, which are very common in microbial communities, for instance in the human gut environment.''
Johanna Rapp - Postdoc
"As a Postdoc in the LinkLab, I take care of our two mass spectrometers – a high resolution Quadrupole-TOF and a Triple Quadrupole. If you are interested to measure the metabolome of your organisms, please contact me.
Before, I started my PostDoc, I studied Technical Biology at the University of Stuttgart. After that, I obtained my PhD in Microbiology at the University of Tuebingen."
Marcelo Navarro-Diaz - Postdoc
''I am Marcelo, I joined the group as a postdoctoral researcher in 2022. I hold a bachelor’s in Biology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where I also did my PhD. in Microbial Ecology. I study the ecological interactions in the human nasal microbiome using a synthetic community and a combination of genomics and metabolomics approaches.''
Vanessa Pahl - PhD Student
''Hi, I am Vanessa and I am interested in climate change and CO2 fixation. For this reason, I am investigating the metabolism of an engineered E. coli that grows solely on CO2 as carbon source and formate as energy source. In my PhD I try to improve this autotrophic E. coli to enable the production CO2 based chemicals, such as amino acids. To achieve this, I will analyse the metabolome to answer important questions about metabolism and physiology of this strain. In close collaboration with the Milo Lab from the Weizmann institute of Science (Israel) we try to close knowledge gaps and improve the growth rate that currently limit the application of this strain.''
Paul Lubrano - PhD Student
''I am a French PhD student who studied Biotechnology in Paris (Sup'Biotech). My experience encompasses working in both academic (CEA, MNHN, France) and industrial (Biosyntia, Denmark) sectors mainly in the engineering of micro-organisms for industrial biotechnology. I also participated in the iGEM competition in 2017 (iGEM IONIS). My current project relies on the multi-omics study of essential processes like translation and transcription in Escherichia coli. I hope to develop industrial and medical applications with such approach.''
Andreas Verhülsdonk - PhD Student
''Moin, I am Andreas, a PhD student interested in the cellular influence of targeted knock-downs in E. coli and S. aureus. I work with libraries I design and curate posssing activateable CRISPRi mechanisms, which I subsequently analyse for their metabolic changes in mass spectrometry. Recently, I additionally started working on induceable cell lysis by CRISPRi activation. Before I started my PhD 2022 in the LinkLab i studied "Applied Biology" near Bonn and "Cellular and Molecular Biology" in Marburg.''
Sevvalli Thavapalan - PhD Student
''Hi, I am Sevvalli, the computational person of the LinkLab. After discovering my love for coding during my studies in biochemistry, I pursued a masters degree in bioinformatics. My main interest is to study the impact of metabolic mutations on the emergence of antibiotic resistances in E. coli and S. aureus. For that I am currently working with genomes of several thousand clinical isolates. Besides that I help out my colleges with computational tasks.''