Guests

Rika Anderson
Carleton College, USA, summer 2004, RCOM Summer Student Fellow, Project: Intact polar lipids from methanotrophic communities at deeply-buried sulfate/methane transition zones, in 2006 co-author of a PNAS paper.

Prof. Dr. Colleen Cavanaugh
Harvard University, 9/2004-12/2004, (Fellow of the Hanse Wissenschaftskollegs, also guet of the MPI Bremen), Project: "The Diversity and Abundance of Methanotrophic Bacteria in Marine and Freshwater Environments", participation in the support of Tobias Mohr`s master thesis.

Steven Cheong
University of California, Irvine, RCOM Summer Student Fellow, summer 2005, Projekt: "A molecular-isotopic approach to study biogeochemical processes and carbon flow in methane-laden sediments".

Dr. Mea Cook
is a post-doctoral investigator from WHOI. She is collaborating with Kai-Uwe Hinrichs (09/2006-12/2006 and 07/2007) to characterize lipid biomarkers from sediments of the Bering Sea. Her project "Hypothesis test methane hydrate dissociation during the last deglaciation in the Bering Sea" is funded by the US Department of Energy in co-laboration with Dr. Lloyd Keigwin.

Dr. Helen Fredricks (nee Sturt)
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 2/2004, 2/2005, 3/2006 Project: "Intact polar lipids in extreme environments", participation in the support of the PhD student Julius Lipp and of the master thesis of Tobias Mohr and Florence Schubotz (both finished meanwhile).

Prof. Dr. Philip Gschwend
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 9/2004-12/2004, (Fellow des Hanse Wissenschaftskollegs, also guest of the MPI Bremen) Project: "Estimating the Biomass of Methanotrophs" participation in the support of Tobias Mohr`s master thesis

Roberta Hansman
Ph.D. Student, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, La Jolla, CA, Advisor: Lihini Aluwihare.
Stayed from 10/2006 until 04/2007.
The goal of my research here in Bremen is to use structural and stable isotope molecular analyses of microbial lipids to determine the reliance of the water column prokaryotic community on methane-derived carbon at cold methane seeps (specifically, the Costa Rica Dome system, Eel River, CA, and Hydrate Ridge, OR). My previous work has included determining the carbon sources fueling marine microbial production through isotopic measurements on total prokaryotic nucleic acids in the water column, as well as the use of molecular biological techniques such as 16S rDNA sequencing and FISH to assess the composition of the microbial community in these environments. My current data set will be complemented through the analysis of the microbial intact polar lipids using HPLC-MS by providing more taxonomic specificity with regards to these samples, in addition to using GC-IRMS to analyze the carbon isotopic composition of the prokaryotic lipids present in the water column above these seep systems.

CarriAyne Jones
PhD student, Odense University, Denmark, two weeks in December 2006. CarriAyne is a first year PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Don Canfield investigating the carbon cycle in the meromictic Lake Cadagno, Switzerland. She will cooperate closely with us on her biomarker studies. On her first visit in Bremen in 2006 she started learning the method of analyzing water column samples on intact polar lipids (IPLs) in our group.

Prof. Dr. Barbara MacGregor
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, two weeks in June, 2005, Project: "Compound-specific isotope analysis of nucleotides by HPLC-isotope ratio-MS".

Meera Mahle
Technical University of Munich, Germany (03-04/2009),
worked on her Bachelor Thesis entitled "Analysis of Intact Polar Lipids in Marine Carbonate Minerals" in our lab.

Nele Meckler
PhD student in the group of Prof. Thierstein, ETH Zürich, 4 weeks in April 2005, Project: Hopanoids as recorders of cyanobacterial productivity in the Cariaco Basin

Lilian Nunez Munoz
Member of the technical staff of the Department of Oceanography and the
Center for Oceanographic Research in the eastern South Pacific
(FONDAP-COPAS),Universidad de Concepcion, Chile.
10-11/2009
I'll have a stay of one and a half month in order to learn the analytical
methods to extract and analyse IPLs in samples of fungies. I will also do
GC/MS biomarker analysis of samples of methanotrophs in marine sediments

Dr. Marianne Nuzzo
IFM-GEOMAR, Kiel, Germany.
4/2008 and 6/2008
I am a post-doctoral investigator from IFM-GEOMAR (Kiel, Germany) working as part of the geochemistry group (principal Investigator: Dr Christian Hensen) of the industry-funded West Nile Delta Project. My research focuses on studying the origin and microbially-mediated recycling of hydrocarbon gases and petroleum in mud volcanoes from the west Nile delta (Egypt). I will collaborate with Prof. Kai-Uwe Hinrichs and Dr. Verena Heuer for lipid biomarkers analyses and measurements of the concentrations and stable carbon isotopic composition of pore water volatile fatty acids.

Dr. Thomas Oldenburg
University of Calgary, Kanada, three weeks in December 2004, Project: Intact polar lipids in biodegraded tar sands and oils

Beth! N. Orcutt
Ph.D. student, University of Georgia, Department of Marine Sciences, Athens, GA, USA, 12/2005 - 03/2006.
I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA, working with Dr. Samantha Joye in the Department of Marine Sciences. The central theme of my research is understanding the microbial communities which perform anaerobic oxidation of methane, sulfate reduction and methanogenesis in gassy and/or oily sediments from methane seeps (in the Gulf of Mexico) and the deep biosphere (under Hydrate Ridge). My sincerest thanks go to Dr. Kai-Uwe Hinrichs, Dr. Marcus Elvert and Julius Lipp of the Research Center Ocean Margins for assistance with lipid biomarker analysis.

Maria Pachiadaki
Hellenic Centre for Marine Research HCMR, Greece
PhD Candidate
Biologist, Environmental Microbiologist
09-10/2008
Biomarker research in our lab.

Dr. John Pohlman
Woods Hole Field Center USGS, USA
3/2008-5/2008
I am interested in the cycling of methane carbon and organic matter in gas hydrate bearing systems. My project will identify the chemotaxonomy and ecological function of archaea and sulfate reducing bacteria at the Barkley Canyon cold seep, offshore Vancouver Island Canada. Compositional and isotopic data from polar and non-polar membrane lipids will be combined with a rich geochemical data set to infer the vertical distribution of microbes within distinct biogeochemical zones.

Dr. Tracy Quan
Environmental Biophysics and Molecular Ecology, Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
4/2007-5/2007

James P. Sáenz
PhD student, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA, 02/2007
Cyanobacteria are arguably one of the most important microorganisms in the ocean. They were the putative originators of oxygenic photosynthesis during the Archean, which was pivotal in the biogeochemical evolution of the early Earth, and presently they are responsible for nearly half of the primary production on Earth’s surface. Of particular interest are the nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria, which provide up to 50% of the fixed nitrogen in the open ocean, fueling the bulk of new primary production through the addition of bioavailable nitrogen to the euphotic zone. My research seeks to develop a proxy for cyanobacterial ecology and productivity, which could help to advance our understanding of the links between climate, microbial ecology, the carbon cycle, and the evolution of this system over Earth’s history. The bacteriohopanepolyols (BHPs), a class of lipids known more generally as hopanoids, are a promising candidate for this application as they are found in many cyanobacteria, they are preserved in the geologic record, and variations in their structure could contain unique chemotaxonomic information. I visited Bremen in Febuary, 2007 to learn and help refine methods for analyzing intact BHPs by HPLC-APCI/MS. It was a great pleasure to visit Dr. Hinrich's group, and I am particularly indebted to Julius Lipp for all of his help.

Dr. Stefan Sievert
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA, 10/2004-12/2004, 6/2005-8/2005, summer 2006, (Fellow of the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg), Project: Anaerobic phototrophic mats as a model for the Achaean and early Proterozoic Biosphere

Sean P. Sylva
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA. 11/2006

Prof. Dr. Roger Summons
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA).
As a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award for U.S. Scientists 2008 and a Fellow of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst he does his research from January until August 2008 in the Organic Geochemistry group as a guest scientist.

Dr. Yoshinori Takano
Guest researcher from Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) as an Internship program between Germany and Japan (Staying from 3/2009 to 5/2009).
Project: Intact polar lipids of benthic microbial communities in surface and deep marine sediments for a diagnosis between present-microbial activity and paleo-productivity records.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Teske
Department of Marine Science, University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, USA
12/2007 - 05/2008
Project:
Benthic microbial communities in surficial and deep marine sediments.

Dr. Courtney Turich
Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, USA, two weeks in October 2006. Dr. Courtney Turich is a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Dr. Stuart Wakeham. She investigates biomarkers in oxic and anoxic water columns (e.g. Cariaco Basin). On a first visit she came to Bremen to learn and apply the method of analyzing intact polar lipids (IPLs) as a marker for live biomass.

Prof. Dr. Stuart Wakeham
Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, Savannah, USA
01/2006-02/2006 funded by NSF.
01/2007-02/2007
03/2008-06/2008
as a Fellow of Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Jørgensen, MPI, Project: Microbial Ecology and Intact Polar Lipids in Marine Anoxic Basins.

Hui Wang (with son), Master, Technician from State Key Lab of Marine Geology, School of Ocean and Earth Sciences of Tongji University. I’ll have a 2-months stay (from Apr. 1st to May 30th 2009) to study the analytical methods about IPLs.