Max Planck Institutes and Experts

Heterogeneous catalysis accelerates reactions important to transportation, environmental and energy processes. Improving our basic understanding of surface chemistry is crucial to overcoming the current trial and error approaches to finding new catalysts and to explain newly discovered phenomena in nature. Our research develops improved means of observing reactions important to catalysis, providing precise data against which new theories of surface chemistry can be developed. Our aim is to understand surface chemistry on the atomic scale and ultimately to predict new catalysts from theory.

The life and survival of humans on Earth depends on the functioning of the outermost layer of our planet, the "Critical Zone." In the Anthropocene, human actions have interfered with the exchange of matter between organisms and ecosystems, threatening the functioning of the Critical Zone. We examine how biodiversity loss reduces continental carbon storage, accelerating climate change. The world of soil microorganisms is the focus of our interest, as this is where the molecular drive of global matter cycles is hidden.

In spring 2020, group leader Frank Drewnick started a research series at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, which was spontaneously initiated during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this series, they investigated everyday materials for their suitability for face masks to support the selection of materials and to better understand which factors influence their efficacy. The group repurposed measuring instruments which they normally use to analyze the properties of atmospheric aerosol particles to measure the filter efficiency and pressure drop of household materials.

The ocean plays a crucial role in the global carbon cycle by absorbing the equivalent of 23 percent of all annual CO₂ emissions, averaged over the past decade, created by human activities. New observation-based estimates, reconstructed using novel neural network methods, reveal however substantial vacillations in the CO₂ uptake on interannual through decadal. The Southern Ocean plays a critical role in the observed fluctuations.

Hybrid crops are favored in agriculture due to their increased vigor and yield. However, the offspring of hybrid plants is genetically variable due to sexual reproduction. Therefore, new hybrid seeds need to be generated by plant breeders year after year - a time consuming and costly process that is not amenable for all crops. Recent research has demonstrated that sexual reproduction can be avoided to produce clonal seeds maintaining the hybrid state. Here, we summarize novel approaches developed in hybrid Arabidopsis and rice promising a revolution in hybrid breeding and seed production.