Our research mainly focuses on the model microorganisms Gluconobacter oxydans and Corynebacterium glutamicum. G. oxydans is an acetic acid bacterium (AAB) and used for the conversion of renewable carbon sources to industrially important chemicals by regioselective and stereoselective periplasmatic oxidations of sugars, sugar alcohols, sugar acids, alcohols and other substrates.

Strains of C. glutamicum are used in industrial biotechnology for amino acid production and in metabolic engineering approaches including new methods such as metabolite sensors and new biosynthesis pathways for improving and developing strains for various purposes including the access to new alternative carbon sources.

Our work includes studies on the AAB G. oxydans, for example to develop and establish regulatable and tunable expression systems in ABB and studies on C. glutamicum for basic and applied research including small non-coding RNAs and the development of chassis strains for production of new valuable products. We use Next Generation Sequencing including RNAseq and ChIP/ChAPseq approaches, DNA microarrays, LC/MS- based proteomics, HPLC analysis and further methods to study and analyse wild-type, engineered or mutagenized strains with respect to SNPs, genomic alterations, genome stability and global RNA, protein level changes, as well as metabolites.

For example, our expert Dipl. Ing. Astrid Wirtz develops, tests and implements methods for the analysis of low molecular weight substances by liquid chromatography (1290 Infinity I, 1260 Infinity II, 1200/1100 Agilent), performs bottom-up nano/microLC-coupled mass spectrometry (TTOF 6600, Sciex), and provides advice and guidance in such analytical methods. Feel free to contact Astrid and discuss your points with her.

Handling and analysis of all of these microbial (omics) data is pivotal and requires application of diverse software including bioinformatics tools and databases as well as specifically developed software tools and databases to obtain comprehensive genome-based data views and knowledge. Building and establishing reference genome-based knowledge databases for microbial genome, omics, phenotypic, regulation and related (meta) data is highly required.