Category: Research

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Mon defended her PhD

At the end of November 2019, Mon successfully defended her Ph.D. She did a beautiful job in front of an expert committee including A/Prof. Annette Rowe (Uni. Cincinnati), A/Prof. Diana Sousa (Uni. Wageningen) and chaired by Prof. Don Canfield (SDU).

Also, right before the defense, we got the good news that two articles included in Mon’s thesis were accepted for publication.

Two days later, Mon took up a new challenge and started a postdoc at the LBNL (Laurence Berkeley National Labs, CA, USA). She’s now up to other exciting adventures in the environmental microbiology of deep biosphere and rhizosphere.

Thesis Cover: Mon Oo Yee

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New paper on odd partnerships fused by conductive particles and workshop in Wageningen

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!

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Preprint from our lab

We discovered that Baltic Sea consortia rich in Geobacter and Methanosarcina carried out syntrophic acetate oxidation (SAO) mediated by conductive particles. 

It’s a really exciting finding not only because it is of importance to our understanding of the iron the methane cycles but also because:

  1. it raises questions how anthropogenic discharge of conductive particles (from agriculture, forestry etc) affects methane emissions
  2. it can explain the presence of electrogens like Geobacter in the methanogenic zone
  3. it can explain isotope ratios characteristic of CO2 reductive methanogenesis in deep sediment layers where Methanosarcina (an acetoclastic methanogen) is abundant
  4. it is the first detailed description of a conductive particle-mediated SAO in consortia from sediments
  5. it is the first NanoSIMS description of a Geobacter-Methanosarcina consortium

We enjoyed doing the work and hope the scientific community will receive it with excitement.