Duration of contract: Up to 4 years 
Planned starting date: ASAP 
Place of work: University of Vienna
Main supervisor: Stephanie A. Eichorst

Supervision team: Dagmar Wöbken

Project description:

Stressed out? So are soil microbes! Soils are habitats with unpredictable conditions for microorganisms, confronting them with suboptimal conditions, also regarding the available O2 concentration. As such, up to 80% of microorganisms in soils are assumed to be in a state of low metabolic activity or dormancy. Yet some aerobic heterotrophs have developed a strategy to deal with these varying O2 concentrations. Contrary to the established notion, we found that Acidobacteriotacan respire nanomolar O2 concentrations using low-affinity instead of high-affinity terminal oxidases. This refutes the standing hypothesis that the capability to respire O2 in microoxic conditions is exclusively based on the presence and activity of high-affinity terminal oxidases.

This project expands upon this finding to ascertain if this observation extends beyond members of the Acidobacteriotausing a combination of respiratory kinetics, genomics, gene expression, knock-out mutants and growth-based experiments, together with our international collaboration partners. This project will have broad-reaching implications to the fields of microbiology, physiology and genomics and ultimately uncover microbial strategies for dealing with environmental stressors.  

Cluster of Excellence Work Package: WP 3.2

Duration of contract: 4 years 
Planned starting date: ASAP 
Place of work: University of Vienna
Main supervisor: Sarah Pati
Supervision team: Thilo Hofmann, Christine Moissl-Eichinger, Andreas Richter

Project description:

This subproject aims to investigate the transformation of emerging pollutants, such as tire additives, pharmaceuticals, and consumer products, by oxygenase enzymes in various microbiomes. Oxygenase enzymes play a crucial role in degrading pollutants in the environment by transforming a wide range of compounds into more polar and bioavailable products. However, under certain conditions, these enzymes exhibit poor efficiency in oxygen utilization, leading to the unintended production of reactive oxygen species (ROS). The PhD candidate in this project will perform exposure experiments with emerging pollutants and microbial communities from soil, freshwater, wastewater, and the human lung. In addition, methods will be developed to identify transformation products and quantify ROS. The outcomes of these experiments will determine whether a negative impact of (emerging) pollutants on environmental and human microbiomes can arise not only from the toxicity of the pollutants and their transformation products but also from the production of ROS by oxygenase enzymes. The ideal candidate has a background in environmental or analytical chemistry and a keen interest in studying organic pollutant transformation with high-resolution mass spectrometry and/or stable isotope techniques.