Press release

An interview with the coral researcher and PhD-student in the Microsensor Group Daniel Schürholz.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology have successfully enhanced cultivation of a microorganism that can fix nitrogen (N₂) while producing methane (CH₄) and ammonia (NH₃) and investigated exciting details of its metabolism. 

The director of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology is now part of the Academy of Sciences of Northern Germany . Today, the new members will be officially welcomed at the Academy's annual celebration in Hamburg.

To what extent does polymetallic nodule mining impact the ecosystem in the deep sea? This is what the MiningImpact expedition SO295 with the research vessel SONNE is investigating for the next two months in the exploration contract areas of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the North Pacific. During...

AWI Director Antje Boetius will receive the Carl-Friedrich-von-Weizsäcker-Prize 2022 for her many years of work as a marine researcher and microbiologist. Endowed with €50,000, the award from the Stifterverband and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina is presented for valuable scien...

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved a third funding phase for the research group FOR 2406 "Proteogenomics of Marine Polysaccharide Degradation" (POMPU). In this research group, researchers from Bremen and Greifswald work together in an interdisciplinary and cross-locational manner t...

From September 24 to 25, it was once again time for the Bremen Research Mile as part of the Maritime Week!

On September 26, 2022, we welcomed 15 new MarMics (students in our International Max Planck Research School of Marine Microbiology) to our institute, the second largest class ever.

News

With a scientific symposium our institute celebrates its first 30 years

News

Dying reefs and once-vibrant corals that have since lost all colour: climate change is having massive effects on the architects of undersea cities. As waters grow warmer, the phenomenon of “coral bleaching” continues to spread. Yet not all corals are equally susceptible. An international team led...

How can we know what bacteria eat? In contrast to animals, they have no trunks, specialized teeth or beaks that provide clues whether the preferred food consists of leaves, meat, small insects or grain. However, bacteria have specific enzymes, which can tell us a lot about their favorite dish. An...

An international research team headed by the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Aarhus University and the Science for Life Lab in Uppsala has developed tiny particles that measure the oxygen concentration in their surroundings. In this way, they can track fluid flow and oxyge...

As of March 1^st, 2022, our institute is hosting a new Max Planck Research Group, led by Dr. Laetitia Wilkins. Wilkins and her team focus on the research of marine host-microbe interactions, their evolution, and their role in ecosystem function and stability.

News

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology now report that seagrasses release large amounts of sugar, largely in the form of sucrose, into their soils – worldwide more than 1 million tons of sucrose, enough for 32 billion cans of coke. Such high concentrations of sugar are s...

Zukunftstag am MPI 2022

Jan-Hendrik Hehemann has been awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant, one of the European Research Council's most highly endowed awards. He will each receive around 2 million euros for his basic research on marine carbon cycling in the coming years.

Tiny predatory bacteria attack microorganisms. These ultramicrobacteria are widely distributed, for example, in sewage treatment plants and in the seafloor. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen now present this exciting finding in the journal Applied and Envir...

Clarissa Karthäuser receives this year's MARUM Research Prize for her dissertation "Sinking particles control fixed nitrogen-loss from the Peruvian oxygen minimum zone". The award is presented to young marine scientists who have written outstanding master's or doctoral theses.

Seagrass meadows play an important role in the marine carbon cycle and our climate. On the one hand, they sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground, on the other hand, they emit the potent greenhouse gas methane. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Micro...

Massive sponge gardens thrive on top of seamounts in the Central Arctic Ocean, one of the most oligotrophic seas on Earth. They appear to feed on the remnants of an extinct fauna. Microorganisms support the sponges in exploiting this fluffy material as a source of food and energy. Scientists from...

Hi my name is Tomasz and I will be working as laboratory assistant in MS-group in Symbiosis department. An internship in the institute is part of my studies: Chemical and Biotechnical Science at the Business Academy Aarhus. I have always enjoyed working in a field of chemistry and this is the rea...

Hello everyone!

My name is Jana and I will be working on the sea4soCiety project to better understand the role of metabolites in carbon sequestration within coastal environments. Previously, my research focused on the interaction between organic matter and metals in aquatic systems. I am particu...

Microorganisms can convert oil into natural gas, i.e. methane. Until recently, it was thought that this conversion was only possible through the cooperation of different organisms. In 2019, Rafael Laso-Pérez and Gunter Wegener from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology suggested that a...

On December 3, 2021, the University of Bremen and the Dr. Hans Riegel Foundation honored pupils in the region for their outstanding pre-scientific work. Winning the prize in the Physics category is Svenja Paulsen, who carried out parts of her now award-winning project work with us at the Max Plan...

The ARB software, a graphically oriented package comprising various tools for sequence database handling and data analysis, has moved one step further. With their latest update, users now profit from many new features as well as improved stability.

Seagrasses cover large swathes of shallow coastal seas, where they provide a vital habitat. They also remove large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere and store it in the ecosystem. However, seagrasses need nutrients to thrive, particularly nitrogen. Up to now, researchers have as...

Grace D'Angelo presented her poster entitled, 'Exploring Carbon Cycling in Complex Microbial Communities with Metaproteome-derived Stable Isotope Fingerprints' at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) conference. This project and poster are part of collaborative work with the Kleiner ...

Carbon occurs on the Earth in a variety of structures and forms. Elemental Carbon is usually formed under conditions of high pressure and temperature. Researchers have now, for the first time, identified microorganisms that produce elemental carbon. The team, which includes Dr. Gunter Wegener of ...

Bacteria from the group Verrucomicrobiota specialize in consuming hard to degrade sugars during spring blooms in the North Sea.

On September 27, 2021, we welcomed 9 new MarMic Master students to the International Max Planck Research School of Marine Microbiology.

A new study in ISME Journal provides exciting insights into the life of marine viruses in the North Sea during the spring bloom. Off the offshore island of Helgoland, researchers led by Nina Bartlau from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology found a dynamic viral community that can str...

The group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and AWI director is honored for her science communication.

Every year, the Max Planck Society (MPS) awards 20 trainee prizes to the best trainees at its 86 institutes and research facilities. This year, one of the prizes goes to Mandy Knutzen, a chemical laboratory assistant trainee at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Marine Microbiology.

Developing innovative and socially accepted approaches to improve the natural potential for carbon storage in vegetation-rich coastal ecosystems: that is the goal of the new research consortium sea4soCiety, in which the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen is participating. Germ...

De­vel­op­ing in­nov­at­ive and so­cially ac­cep­ted ap­proaches to im­prove the nat­ural po­ten­tial for car­bon stor­age in ve­get­a­tion-rich coastal eco­sys­tems: that is the goal of the new re­search con­sor­tiumsea4soCiety, in which the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Mar­ine Mi­cro­bi­o­logy in...

It was long assumed that cyanobacteria were mainly responsible for fixing nitrogen on early Earth, thus making nitrogen available to the biosphere. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, now show that purple sulfur bacteria could have contributed subst...

Life on Earth today relies on the presence of oxygen. However, the process behind the step-wise rise of oxygen levels in the atmosphere, which took place over nearly two billion years, remains under debate. An international team of scientists around Judith Klatt from the Max Planck Institute for ...

We congratulate Dr. Dolma Michellod on the successful defense of her PhD thesis entitled, "Investigating the lipid profile of animal-microbe symbioses."

A new laser ion source was installed in our lab. With the brand new AP-SMALDI-5AF we are able to do routine measurements at spatial resolution down to 5 µm. Additionally we increase measurement speed and sample throughput up to ten fold if a lower mass resolution is acceptable. 

Whether summer or winter, midnight sun or polar night – the sand on the ocean floor is always inhabited by the same bacteria. Although the microbial communities differ between different ocean regions, they do not change between the seasons. Presumably, there is simply no room for change. Research...

Scientists from three Max Planck Institutes (MPI), the MPI for Medical Research in Heidelberg, the MPI for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and the MPI for Biophysics in Frankfurt and the Radboud University in Nijmegen have successfully determined the structure of the enzyme which produces a large p...

This pandemic year has seen us confined to our homes and restricted from travelling the world. Not so for some microscopic bacteria in the ocean: Throughout the globe, they partner up with clams from the family Lucinidae, which live unseen in the sand beneath the shimmering blue waters of coastal...

Correlative chemical imaging in symbiosis: Our workflow, combining mass spectrometry imaging and microCT in a multimodal 3D atlas of a symbiotic invertebrate is now online in PNAS. Congrats Benedikt! 

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023773118

Hot vents in the deep sea are home to microbes that feed on ethane. They were discovered recently from scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology. Now the researchers from Bremen succeeded in finding an important component in the microbial conversion of the gas. They were able...

Even if they seem very common for us – earthworms are special because they keep our soil healthy, all over the world. From the outside they appear simple and inconspicuous. But what the earthworm looks like from the inside, from its organs to the microbes and parasites that colonize it, has been ...

Study finds new explanation for the accumulation of organic compounds in oxygen-depleted marine areas.

Deep down in the ocean, valuable raw materials are stored, such as nodules of manganese, iron, cobalt and copper. The resources from these nodules could help meeting our increasing demand for rare metals. However, in addition to the nodules, there is another treasure down there: A complex ecosyst...

The mass2adduct paper, which describes a method for identifying adducts in mass-spec imaging data, was recently published. Congrats to the team consisting of Moritz Janda, Brandon KB Seah, Dennis Jakob, Janine Beckmann, Benedikt Geier, and Manuel Liebeke. Find out more at these links:

In the deep waters that underlie the productive zones of the ocean, there is a constant rain of organic material called 'marine snow'. Marine snow does not only look like real snow but also behaves similarly: Large flakes are rare and fall quickly while highly abundant smaller flakes take their t...

INVITATION

Thursday, May 6, 2021 
at 3:00 p.m. (15:00h)

Dr. Florent Lassalle (Imperial College London, UK)

will give a digital seminar with the title:

"Phylogenetic methods to model the processes of gene flow within microbial populations and reconstruct their evolutionary genetic history"

Deep down in the seafloor anaerobic microbes consume large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas when it enters atmosphere. Even though this process is a crucial element of the global carbon cycle, it is still poorly understood. Gunter Wegener from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microb...

Sponges: They are considered to be one of the most primitive forms of animal life, because they have neither locomotion organs nor a nervous system. A team around deep-sea scientist Antje Boetius has now discovered that sponges leave trails on the sea floor in the Arctic deep sea. They conclude t...

Dennis Jakob presented a poster at the virtual It Ma(t)Ters conference on his Master's thesis work combining spatial metabolomics with spatial transcriptomics. With this work, Dennis won one of the poster prizes voted on by the conference attendees. 

This year, two researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology are receiving the prestigious Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society – a great honour for the researchers and our institute.

Scientists of the JPI Oceans project “MiningImpact” are embarking on a 6-week expedition to the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ) in the Pacific. Their goal is to carry out independent scientific monitoring of the test of a pre-prototype nodule collector machine conducted in parallel from a ...

Bald eagles, as well as other wildlife, have been succumbing to a mysterious neurodegenerative disease in the southern United States since the 1990s. New research by a team from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in Germany and the University of Georgia, USA, and including researcher...

We congratulate Dennis Jakob, who successfully defended his Master's thesis entitled, "Combining MALDI MS imaging and transcriptomics to investigate phenotypic heterogeneity of intracellular symbionts in deep-sea mussels" 

We congratulate Tobias Vonnahme and his fellow authors to the IC-DLI „Deep Life Paper“ Award 2020!

Each spring in the North Sea, tiny algae grow in large numbers and release loads of sugar into the water – a feast for bacteria. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the University of Greifswald have now investigated the order of the bacterial menu: first the easy-...

Too many carbohydrates, especially the simple, sweet sugars, can make you fat. Complex sugars like fiber, on the other hand, are an important factor for our health. Unlike simple sugars, we cannot easily digest these fibers in vegetables and grains. They are thought to work like a lubricant that ...

They are also called power plants of the cells: the mitochondria. They are present in almost all eukaryotic cells and they supply the cells with energy. Until now, it was assumed that only mitochondria can act as the cells’ energy providers. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Micro...

Invitation to the MPI seminar

Thursday, February 25, 2021

at 3:00 p.m. (CET)

Ass. Prof. A. Murat Eren

• MBL Fellow, Marine Biological Laboratory
• Assistant Professor, The Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago
• Committee on Microbiology, The Biomedical Sciences Cluster at the University of Chicago

wil...

Rather sweet than salty: In the ocean microalgae produce a lot of sugar during algae blooms. These enormous quantities of algal biomass are normally recycled rapidly by marine bacteria – a degradation process that is an important part of the global carbon cycle. Especially sugars have been consid...

EVENTS AT THE MPI BREMEN 

Due to the Covid 19 pandemic, currently no events are taking place at our institute.

We are looking forward to welcome you hopefully soon again!

EVENTS AT THE MPI BREMEN 

Due to the Covid 19 pandemic, currently no events are taking place at our institute.

We are looking forward to welcome you hopefully soon again!

Genetic information can be rapidly decoded using high-throughput methods and made available in openly accessible Digital Sequence Information (DSI) databases. This genetic information is used for comparative analyses and is indispensable for life sciences research. Examples include the research o...

A new study in the prestigious journal Science Advances shows that stress from rising water temperatures reduces ability of corals to adapt to ocean acidification.

EVENTS AT THE MPI BREMEN 

Due to the Covid 19 pandemic, currently no events are taking place at our institute.

We are looking forward to welcome you hopefully soon again!

Due to a change in our telephone system we now have four-digit extensions – please update your contacts!

Join in to bring us a colorful Christmas season!

Gunter Wegener and Fanni Aspetsberger describe our current research on anaerobic microbes that feed on natural gas and crude oil.

Carbon monoxide is a very poisonous gas. Humans die within minutes when they inhale it. However, some microorganisms tolerate carbon monoxide and even use it to breathe and replicate. Knowledge about how these bacteria survive opens a window into the primeval times of the earth and the origin of ...

They are the true rulers of the earth: microorganisms. Without them there would be no air to breathe, no soil to grow food, no clean water. Microbes in the sea and ocean play a significant role in making the "System Earth" work. Yet little is known about them. This is why research on marine micro...

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen are developing a user-friendly method to reconstruct and analyze SSU rRNA from raw metagenome data.

Dr. Boran Kartal, group leader of the Microbial Physiology Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, was appointed cooperation professor at the Jacobs University in Bremen, which thereby strengthens its teaching and research activities. Kartal, togethe...

Deep-seabed mining is considered a way to address the increasing need of rare metals. However, the environmental impacts are considered to be substantial but remain largely unknown and clear regulatory standards are lacking. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Breme...

The Otto Mønsted Foundation has provided funding for Dr. Manuel Liebeke to join as a guest professor at the Danish Technical Institute in 2021. He will collaborate with the CeMiSt center in their new mass spectrometry imaging center and participate in talks, seminars, and other interactions with ...

Congratulations: Dr. Katharina Kitzinger has been awarded the Reimar Lüst Fellowship by the Max Planck Society (MPG). This will support the post-doctoral scientist’s research on the marine nitrogen cycle at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen for another two years.

We are pleased to welcome the MarMic class 2025. We wish the seven students much success and an exciting time with many new insights!

We humans need oxygen to breath – for a lot of microbes it is a lethal poison. That is why microorganisms have developed ways to render oxygen molecules harmless. Microbiologists from Bremen, Marburg and Grenoble have now succeeded in decrypting such a mechanism. They show, how methane-generating...

Marine biologist and symbiosis researcher Prof. Dr. Nicole Dubilier, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, received an Excellence Professorship from the Prof. Dr. Werner-Petersen Foundation for her scientific achievements, endowed with 20,000 euros. The award cer...

As a side effect of their metabolism, microorganisms living on methane can also convert ammonia. In the process, they produce nitric oxide (NO), a central molecule in the global nitrogen cycle. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen (DE), and Radboud University, ...

Nice to see: Matt shimmering metal letters now decorate the entrance area of our institute. Above the stairs to the main entrance, the words “Max-Planck-Institut für Marine Mikrobiologie” welcome staff and guests, making our institute more visible. The new design of the outer walls also includes ...

With about 1 million euros, the foundation is supporting an international team of researchers led by Susanne Erdmann from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in the project "A plasmid goes viral".

Two new vehicles are available for transports and expeditions.

When the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen was founded in 1992, the handful of employees at that time did not even have their own building. Almost 30 years have passed since then and after the institute building was constructed in 1996, it has grown steadily. Now, we are goin...

The scientist Dr. Katharina Kitzinger from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology is one of the winners of this year's MARUM Research Award. She receives the award for her outstanding research on key processes in the nitrogen cycle in the sea, the microorganisms involved and the peculia...

Plastic debris can be found even in the most remote regions of the oceans. Usually it is impossible to determine how long it has been lying on the seabed. Up to now, this has also hampered any attempt to estimate how long plastic degradation might take. Scientists from Kiel and Bremen have now, f...

In several online exhibitions, an international team of researchers, under the direction of cruise leader Prof. Dr. Gerhard Bohrmann from MARUM – Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, takes visitors to the internet platform Google Arts & Culture on an expedition.

"Together we’re stronger" – The motto of the Bremen Town Musicians, is especially true in these difficult times. But it is not only since the outbreak of the corona pandemic that a picture of the famous sculpture in the center of Bremen adorns the profile picture at WhatsApp of marine chemist Car...

Brown algae are important players in the global carbon cycle by fixing large amounts of carbon dioxide and thus extracting this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Moreover, because microbial decomposition of dead brown algae is slower than that of other marine plants, carbon dioxide fixed by bro...

No excuses anymore. Whenever you look for our institute, now you can easily find it: Since today it is labelled, well visible to everyone. MPI – these three letters at the wall of our building welcome both staff and guests. Just move your eyes up, and you will see it. The meaning of MPI might be ...

The U Bremen Research Alliance makes the research strength of the university and its non-university partners – amongst them the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology – visible across the globe: The collaboration with the eleven regional research institutes will now be perpetuated: The U Br...

It was only relatively recently that tiny, single-celled thaumarchaea were discovered to exist and thrive in the pelagic ocean, where their population size of roughly ten billion quintillion cells makes them one of the most abundant organisms on our planet. A team of researchers from the MARUM – ...

Deep-sea mining could provide a way to address the increasing need of rare metals. However, its environmental impact is only partially known. In addition, there is a lack of clear standards to regulate mining and set binding thresholds for the impact on the organisms living in affected areas. Res...