Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen

The mid-embryonic developmental stages are strikingly similar in animals, plants and algae

Some brown algae off the coast of Japan develop from unfertilized egg cells

SynTracker allows the analysis of structural genomic variations in microbial populations

The Damietta Server broadens the accessibility to protein design research and its applications in various biotechnological and biomedical fields
 

Developmental plasticity plays a crucial role in the predatory development of Allodiplogaster sudhausi

Brown algae are outsiders – neither plant nor animal, neither fungus nor bacteria. Their unique position in the tree of life makes them very interesting to Susana Coelho and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen. The researchers want to find out whether evolution has taken two different paths to the same important innovation: the emergence of female and male individuals.

Bacteria are almost everywhere. We encounter them as pathogens or causative agents of infections. But they are our indispensable helpers. For example, without intestinal bacteria we would not be able to digest our food so effectively. A diverse microbial community – known as the microbiome – has co-existed with humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Ruth Ley and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tuebingen are researching how microbes have influenced human evolution.

Parasites exist not only in the plant and animal kingdoms, they are also a part of us. Our genome contains myriad short stretches of DNA that propagate at the genome’s expense. For this reason, these transposons, as they are called, are also referred to as parasitic DNA. Oliver Weichenrieder from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen wants to shed light on the processes by which transposons are copied – not only because they can cause disease, but also because they may be an important engine of evolution.

Admittedly, the research subject isn’t particularly appetizing: Strongyloides stercoralis – small parasitic worms that live in their host’s intestines and have the potential to cause severe problems. Nevertheless, Adrian Streit from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen is fascinated by this threadworm. It has a unique life cycle, and to this day, no one really understands why.

The human body is home to countless microbes. The intestinal tract, in particular, is colonized by innumerable bacteria. As a young environmental microbiologist, Ruth Ley never imagined that she would one day find herself interested in the human gut and the microbiota that reside in it. Today she conducts research at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, investigating the role the countless intestinal bacteria play in our health.

Climate change is radically altering the Earth’s plant and animal life. This is due not only to the rise in mean temperatures throughout the world, but also to the changes in temperature variability between both day and night, and summer and winter. George Wang, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, analyzes climate data with a view to researching the influence of the altered conditions on flora and fauna.

What are the origins of new disease outbreaks in agriculture? How do pathogens evolve to infect new hosts and adapt to agricultural environments? These are some of the questions we are tackling, while pursuing disease outbreaks in kiwifruit orchards across South Korea and in banana grown across the Indonesian Archipelago.

Symbioses with microbes span a gradient of interaction outcomes across the mutualism-to-parasitism continuum. But how stable are these designations? Are mutualists beneficial under all conditions? And are parasites destined to always harm their hosts?

Many biological processes are studied in great detail in laboratory settings. However, their ecological relevance and significance is often hard to study because the way back from the lab to nature is difficult. My team and I study how nematodes compete for short-lived resources at scarab beetle carcasses. This work is carried out on small tropical island in the Indian Ocean with unique conditions. This work allows laboratory findings to be tested in “real life”, providing strong evidence for the importance of developmental plasticity and the organisms’ response to fluctuating environments.

Though we are in the era of thousand genome projects, the genes predicted within these genomes still leave much to be desired. In particular, some of the simplifying assumptions result in errors as soon as the peculiarities of molecular biology come into play. Thus, there is a continued need to improve the machine learning and other algorithms used in gene prediction. In the course of assembling and annotating new genomes, we developed a program, Intronarrator, to overcome the gene prediction inaccuracy due to tiny introns by direct intron predictions from deep RNA sequencing.

Brown algae are multicellular eukaryotes that have been evolving independently from animals and plants for more than a billion years. Brown algae have invented a fascinating diversity of body patterns and reproductive characteristics, whose molecular basis remains totally unexplored. We are using the richness of morphological and sexual features of these enigmatic organisms to shed light into the origin of multicellularity and the evolution of sex determination across the eukaryotic tree of life.