New Max Planck Research Group at the MPIMM: Microbial Metabolism

„I am in­ter­ested in a group of microbes called methanogens, which have the ability to produce methane, a greenhouse gas as well as a biofuel“, says Wagner. „With my group, I aim to understand, at the molecular level, how methanogens are surviving and growing in extreme environments. How do they generate methane from different sources of carbon so efficiently? How do they convert minerals into the elementary bricks of life? And how do they protect themselves against stresses from their natural environment?”

Tristan Wagner joins us from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, where he worked in the „Microbial protein structure“-group of Seigo Shima. He car­ried out his Ph.D. at Institut Pasteur in Paris, fo­cus­ing on the regulation of the citric acid cycle in mycobacteria. Since, he decided to switch from the bacterial world to the archaeal one and studied their metabolisms. He was active as a microbiologist and biochemist to elucidate how methanogens are able to fix carbon dioxide and generate methane by elucidating their enzymatic machineries at the structural level.