Dr. Har­ald Gruber-Vodicka

Evol­u­tion, Func­tion and Eco­logy of Mar­ine Sym­bi­oses

My re­search fo­cuses on the evol­u­tion, the func­tion and the eco­logy of mar­ine sym­bi­oses. I strive to test hy­po­theses and to gain a mech­an­istic un­der­stand­ing of the func­tions and pro­cesses in mar­ine an­imal-mi­crobe in­ter­ac­tions. I am par­tic­u­lar­ily in­ter­ested in in­tra­cel­lu­lar in­ter­ac­tions and I use two main mod­els, chemo­syn­thetic sym­bi­oses in shal­low wa­ter sed­i­ments and placo­zo­ans – mi­cro­scopic benthic grazers on biofilms. In ad­di­tion I de­velop bioin­form­at­ics tools to in­teg­rate mo­lecu­lar eco­logy and next gen­er­a­tion se­quen­cing.

Main research topics are

• Host - Symbiont fidelity
• Symbiont Function
• Host - Symbiont Interaction
• Reductive Genome Evolution
• Host and Symbiont Taxonomy

I have developed software that analyses metagenomes based on the small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU) reads and reconstructs full length SSU genes from metagenomic data for all domains of life

phyloFlash - rapid re­con­struc­tion and phylo­gen­etic ex­plor­a­tion of SSU rRNAs from Il­lu­mina (meta)ge­n­omic or tran­scrip­tomic data­sets
https://github.com/HRGV/phyloFlash

Please visit my personal homepage for more details: http://hgrubervodicka.weebly.com/