My professional career as microbiologist started at the University of Regensburg, where I got taught anaerobic cultivation techniques by growing archaea from deep sea samples. From this point on, I was fascinated by unique microbes which were hardly studied and which provide many riddles to solve.

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In 2012 a project on anaerobic fungi and their potential to improve biogas production in Dr. Michael Lebuhn’ s lab for micro- and molecular biology at the LfL in Freising caught my attention. During an internship at IBERS I learned how to isolate, grow and maintain anaerobic fungi. Enabling me to work on projects in which we try to use anaerobic fungi and their lignocellulolytic capabilities to improve bioenergy production.

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Aside of HipoAF I am working on this topic in two projects currently: (i) A sequencing project at the Joint Genome Institute (Walnut Creek, California), aiming at sequencing genomes, transcriptomes and proteomes of six anaerobic fungal isolates. (ii) A project how to improve biogas production from maize straw, in which we try anaerobic fungi as a pre-treatment.

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I hope that the basic questions we solve by our work in HipoAF will help to realize the utilization of anaerobic fungi for biogas production or other biotechnological applications.