Welcome

The Hinrichs Lab in Organic Geochemistry is located in the MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Research at the Uni- versity of Bremen. Our educational activities are embedded in the curricula of the Department of Geosciences where Kai-Uwe Hinrichs teaches as Professor of Organic Geochemistry.
 
We are broadly concerned with organic matter in the environ- ment and in geological systems. This naturally produced organic material, consisting of the fossilized remains of plants and animals, is on the one hand an important regulator of our planet’s redox balance and on the other hand a superb pool of information on geobiological processes. With our research we aim to decipher this information. As international group of chemists, geologists, oceanographers, and biologists, we are tackling exciting research problems in geobiology and biogeochemistry while crossing the boundaries of traditional scientific disciplines.

Click here to learn more about our overarching research questions, projects, team, techniques, publications, and about options to pursue an academic education in the Hinrichs Lab.

News

New paper in Deep-Sea Research I February 2012: Stuart Wakeham is a professor at Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (USA), Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Fellow and long-term collaborator of the Hinrichs Lab. In this paper, he and his colleagues generated a multidimensional, high resolution data set that shows the existence of a multilayered chemocline with tightly coupled element cycles in the anoxic Cariaco Basin off Venezuela. Full article. mehr...

New paper in Geochimica Cosmochimica Acta January 2012: Yu-Shih Lin and colleagues have optimized and tested methods for the analysis of H2 concentrations in porewaters of deep subseafloor sediments. In sediments on the continental margin off Namibia they find a relaxation of syntrophic coupling betwen H2-producing and H2-consuming activities. Full article. mehr...

Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry Nov. 2011: Marcos Yoshinaga et al. achieve rapid and straightforward characterization of intact archaeal membrane lipids in the complex organic matrices of natural environments using HPLC/electrospray ionization (ESI)-ITMSn and the systematic MS2 fragementation patterns of these lipids. Full article. mehr...

New paper in Organic Geochemistry November 2011: Xiaolei Liu and colleagues report a new series of archaeal lipids, widespread in marine sediments and tentatively assigned as isoprenoid glycerol dialkanol diethers (GDDs). They are structural analogs of isoprenoid glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (GDGTs), with one glycerol unit missing and with each biphytanyl moiety possessing a terminal OH group. The identification of GDDs in marine sediments supports the recently proposed fossil lipid recycling by benthic archaea. Full article. mehr...

New paper in Organic Geochemistry October 2011: Aiming to elucidate the symbiosis between mussels and chemosynthetic microorganisms at cold seeps and hot vents, Matthias Kellermann and colleagues have tracked the carbon flow in such systems by qualitative and stable carbon isotope analysis of membrane lipids. They find that the bacterial symbionts have characteristic intact polar lipids which qualify as specific biomarkers and that they serve as the main carbon source for the mussels. Full article. mehr...