Welcome to the Microbial Oceanography Lab at the University of Vienna

Marine microbes are uniquely important to life and form the major pillars of the biosphere. Their unique metabolisms allow marine microbes to carry out many steps of the biogeochemical cycles that other organisms are unable to complete.

Microbial oceanography focuses on deciphering the metabolic activity of Bacteria and Archaea thriving in the open ocean and relating their community composition to the biogeochemical fluxes in the water masses. This requires an interdisciplinary approach linking microbial and molecular ecology to biogeochemistry and to large scale water mass transport studied in physical oceanography.

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Our main focus is the microbial oceanography of the deep ocean where the prokaryotic activity is relatively low compared to the euphotic zone. The deep ocean comprises about 70% of the total ocean volume and hence deep-water microbes mediate a substantial fraction of the biogeochemical cycles with thus far unknown metabolic pathways. We develop and improve available methods in molecular biology and biogeochemistry to make them usable in the most oligotrophic parts of the ocean. Then the information from biology and biogeochemistry is linked for a better understanding of how the microbial community might work in the dark ocean.

News

10.01.2022
 

Phylogenetically and functionally diverse microorganisms reside under the Ross Ice Shelf

Publication
05.01.2022
 

The Vienna Research Groups for Young Investigators announced a call for a tenure track position in Environmental Systems Research

News
11.12.2021
 

Congratulations to Federico Baltar on getting promoted to the Associate Professor rank

News
20.11.2021
 

We are looking for motivated and hard-working PhD students

News
15.11.2021
 

We congratulate Zihao Zhao for defending his PhD thesis

News
26.07.2021
 

We congratulate Jennifer Hennenfeind for defending her MSc thesis

News

Video Testimonials

Maria Pinto, PhD Student

Chie Amano, PostDoc

Federico Baltar, Assistant Professor