I have been granted tenure after three years as Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. Today, 1st of November 2018, is my first day in the capacity of tenured Associate Professor. I am excited about my new role and curious to learn and develop further.
Year: 2018
My first Ph.D. student Mon Oo Yee just preprinted her first paper: Extracellular electron uptake by two Methanosarcina species.
Mon discovered that although two different Methanosarcina could do DIET, they differed in their capability to do electromethanogenesis at a fixed cathode potential.
We are excited to hear how the scientific community receives her work.
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New preprint from our lab
In incubations originated from the sediments of a ferruginous, early Earth analogue lake, we were surprised to discover that the interspecies association between Youngiibacter and Methanothrix was strictly dependent on conductive particles. Here is a link to our paper.
The implication of this study is that mineral-syntrophy could be the relic of ancestral associations between protocells splitting metabolic tasks, prior to the evolution of a complex EET-apparatus required for today’s interspecies associations.
Xiaochen Yang, is our new colleague for the next two months. Xiaochen has a PhD from the Danish Technological University and will do his internship on electrochemical systems and fluorescence microscopy techniques.
Welcome to the lab, Xiaochen!
Finally, great to see our BioRxiv paper just published by mBio. Also, SDU Nat’s press officer (Birgitte Svennevig) published a EurekaAlert and a press release on SDU’s website calling attention to our work. This work is a contribution to a project funded by the Danish Research Council in 2013.
Wageningen: a sneak peak at conductive particle-mediated syntrophy
Just before the paper was released I visited Wageningen University were I held a workshop and lecture on conductive particle-mediated syntrophy. It was an absolutely fantastic experience to lecture on syntrophy at a place where syntrophy has been studied for decades. The Wageningen visit was only possible thanks to A/Prof. Diana Sousa. Thank you Diana for the invite!