Impact of Emerging Pollutants on Microbiomes across Systems
Duration of contract: 3 years 2 months
Planned starting date: ASAP
Place of work: University of Vienna
Main supervisor: Alexander Loy (CV | Lab Homepage)
Supervision team: Christine Moissl-Eichinger, Andreas Richter
This position has been filled.
Project description:
The impact of individual contaminants and their combinations will initially be tested (i) on the growth of representative strains of the human lung and gut microbiome, and (ii) on the composition, activity, and ecosystem functions of the microbiota in samples from different human individuals and various soils types. More in-depth functional microbiome analyses by metagenomics/-transcriptomics will subsequently be performed in in-vitro lung, gut, and soil microcosms from selected samples.
The postdoc will perform and lead experiments on individual strains and in-vitro microcosms. Methods include but are not limited to quantitative 16S rRNA amplicon profiling, analyses of microbial activities (e.g. via heavy water-based assays) and key environmental processes (e.g. respiration/fermentation, ammonification, methanogenesis, sulfidogenesis), metagenomics/-transcriptomics, and bioinformatics analyses & data integration. The work is performed in close collaboration with a postdoc contributing chemical analytics of pollutant dynamics and toxicity.