Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen

The genomes of brown algal species with diverse sexual systems reveal how sex chromosomes originate, evolve, and sometimes transform into autosomes

Scientists uncover the genetic trade-offs involved in allowing predatory fungi to stick to their nematode prey

A training-free approach in computational protein binder design unlocks new possibilities in next-generation biomedical applications

Mechanical compression induces multicellular organization in archaea

Study highlights the role of long-term environmental changes in the evolution of predatory behaviour in nematodes

Max Planck researchers cooperate with partners in more than 120 countries. Here they write about their personal experiences and impressions. Honour McCann from the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen is spending four weeks in Indonesia. Together with her Indonesian partners, she is searching for the origin of a pathogen that infects banana plants and is currently spreading throughout plantations in Asia.

Brown algae are outsiders – neither plant nor animal, neither fungus nor bacteria. Their unique position in the tree of life makes them very interesting to Susana Coelho and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen. The researchers want to find out whether evolution has taken two different paths to the same important innovation: the emergence of female and male individuals.

Bacteria are almost everywhere. We encounter them as pathogens or causative agents of infections. But they are our indispensable helpers. For example, without intestinal bacteria we would not be able to digest our food so effectively. A diverse microbial community – known as the microbiome – has co-existed with humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Ruth Ley and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tuebingen are researching how microbes have influenced human evolution.

Parasites exist not only in the plant and animal kingdoms, they are also a part of us. Our genome contains myriad short stretches of DNA that propagate at the genome’s expense. For this reason, these transposons, as they are called, are also referred to as parasitic DNA. Oliver Weichenrieder from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen wants to shed light on the processes by which transposons are copied – not only because they can cause disease, but also because they may be an important engine of evolution.

Admittedly, the research subject isn’t particularly appetizing: Strongyloides stercoralis – small parasitic worms that live in their host’s intestines and have the potential to cause severe problems. Nevertheless, Adrian Streit from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen is fascinated by this threadworm. It has a unique life cycle, and to this day, no one really understands why.

The human body is home to countless microbes. The intestinal tract, in particular, is colonized by innumerable bacteria. As a young environmental microbiologist, Ruth Ley never imagined that she would one day find herself interested in the human gut and the microbiota that reside in it. Today she conducts research at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, investigating the role the countless intestinal bacteria play in our health.

For many years, it was unclear how the transmembrane protein ACD6 contributes to immunity in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. By studying natural genetic variation, we discovered two small proteins that bind to ACD6, with one positively regulating the standard version of ACD6 and the other negatively regulating a naturally hyperactive version of ACD6. These insights in turn spurned experiments that revealed ACD6 to be an ion channel. Together, these experiments highlight how the study of genetic variation can reveal new biology that is not accessible to standard genetic screens.

What are the origins of new disease outbreaks in agriculture? How do pathogens evolve to infect new hosts and adapt to agricultural environments? These are some of the questions we are tackling, while pursuing disease outbreaks in kiwifruit orchards across South Korea and in banana grown across the Indonesian Archipelago.

Symbioses with microbes span a gradient of interaction outcomes across the mutualism-to-parasitism continuum. But how stable are these designations? Are mutualists beneficial under all conditions? And are parasites destined to always harm their hosts?

Many biological processes are studied in great detail in laboratory settings. However, their ecological relevance and significance is often hard to study because the way back from the lab to nature is difficult. My team and I study how nematodes compete for short-lived resources at scarab beetle carcasses. This work is carried out on small tropical island in the Indian Ocean with unique conditions. This work allows laboratory findings to be tested in “real life”, providing strong evidence for the importance of developmental plasticity and the organisms’ response to fluctuating environments.

Though we are in the era of thousand genome projects, the genes predicted within these genomes still leave much to be desired. In particular, some of the simplifying assumptions result in errors as soon as the peculiarities of molecular biology come into play. Thus, there is a continued need to improve the machine learning and other algorithms used in gene prediction. In the course of assembling and annotating new genomes, we developed a program, Intronarrator, to overcome the gene prediction inaccuracy due to tiny introns by direct intron predictions from deep RNA sequencing.